A Violence Done Most Kindly
by orangeflavor
Summary: "There is an old sort of magic to sacrifice, after all." - Jon and Sansa. Stark is a house of many winters.
1. Hunger

Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Author's Note: This is going to be a Season 7/8 AU. To summarize the major plot points up until now, this 'verse branches out roughly post Battle of the Bastards in canon, the mass murder of the Freys by Arya still stands, Cersei has been killed but her murderer hasn't been determined yet, Daenerys has only just landed in Westeros, the occupation/battle over Riverrun never happened as the Freys were slaughtered beforehand, and both Edmure and Brynden Tully are still alive, Bran found his way to Winterfell while Jon and Sansa dealt with ruling the North and preparing for a war with the dead, as well as the shifting power dynamics in Westeros now that Cersei has died. This story also assumes established Jonsa. Soft E. Dark. Politics and magic and murder and sex. That's essentially the gist of it.

I HIGHLY recommend that you read 'Bruises' before getting into this. It serves as a prequel of sorts, and it's only a one-shot so it reads pretty quickly. 'Bruises' really helps to set up the tone of where Jonsa is at the start of this fic.

A Violence Done Most Kindly

Chapter One: Hunger

_"There is an old sort of magic to sacrifice, after all." _ \- Jon and Sansa. Stark is a house of many winters.

It would be a lie to say that Sansa understands Cersei now – here at the end.

Here where she warms her brother's bed.

Sansa imagines Cersei looked at Ser Jamie like this once, watching him in his sleep beside her. Or perhaps not. Perhaps theirs was always a quick, furtive fuck. A blinding instant of lust and need, smothered in dark alcoves and behind garish tapestries, a secret, silent thing – clawing at them from the inside.

Perhaps they've never slept the night through beside each other.

Perhaps she regretted it – gurgling out his name while she choked on her own blood.

Sansa reaches up to trace a hand down the side of Jon's face, trailing past his jaw, along the cords of muscle flexing in his throat beneath her touch, whispering down his chest as he groans to wakefulness. She slips her hand to his growing hardness with a surety that might have been foreign to the little dove Cersei once knew.

But then, maybe that is also a lie.

"Sansa," he groans, head thrown back along the pillow, voice rough with sleep and desire.

She braces her lips to his neck, imagines the rush of blood just beneath her mouth – pulls him from slumber with a selfish, desperate yearning she does not regret. "I need you," she breathes into his skin, teeth sinking down.

Jon growls his answer, grabbing her by the hair, yanking her head back and kissing her hungrily. He turns her easily, bracing her back along the bed as he covers her with his weight, already hard and ready in her hand.

Some small part of her wishes Cersei had been her kill. A different, equally intense part of her, is relieved beyond words that she isn't – that she would never be, now.

But more than that – more than a vengeful wrath she's spent too long feeding to ever be free of hunger, to ever be satisfied with a mere raven scroll and the somber, even way Bran announces the news – _more than that_ –

She just needs Jon.

"Come back to me," she whispers against his mouth, moving with him in the dark.

No, she doesn't think she'll ever understand Cersei.

But as she feels Jon slip inside her, as she cradles his groan in the hollow of her throat, as she catches her lips at his temple – she thinks she doesn't need to.

It's a different hunger she feeds now, after all.

* * *

Sansa recognizes the sound of Baelish's footsteps well before he's made it to her side. He slinks like shadow easily enough across stone and wood and dirt, but here in the godswood, trudging through snow in the womb of winter, his steps are almost awkward, clunky.

He does not belong here. She knows this now with a certainty she hasn't felt in years.

"My lady, I had hoped to find you here."

Sansa only sighs, glancing away from the red weirwood leaves to meet his gaze over her shoulder. She offers a silent nod in greeting.

Baelish makes his way toward her, smoothing his hands over his robe when he settles beside her. "You have not forgotten what we spoke of when last I found you here, I should hope."

Sansa tugs her furs tighter around her shoulders, eyes drifting back to the weirwood branches. "How could one forget?"

"Yes," he murmurs, eyes drifting down her face and trailing the length of her throat.

She tries not to swallow, not to give notice of her discomfort. He takes a step closer. She resolutely does not take one back.

"This is a very crucial time for us, Sansa, you must know that."

"Cersei is dead," she says in answer, and she thinks maybe it should feel different along her tongue. Lighter, perhaps. Sweeter. Instead, it's nothing but a stringent tartness.

"Yes, and by whose hand? None of my people seem to know the answer to that, except for whispers of faceless girls. Dead end gossip." He looks at her out of the corner of his eye, appraising.

Sansa gives him nothing to appraise. "Is that what matters right now?"

He stays quiet a moment, and then, "It is, until we can ascertain whose side her murderer is on."

Another silence. Sansa stretches a gloved hand out to catch the faint flecks of snow falling from the branches.

"We can't let this opportunity pass us by. Cersei's death has lead to infighting amongst the houses. King's Landing is in near shambles with no discernible sovereign. Qyburn has fled without the support of his queen. The Mountain hasn't been seen since reports of Cersei's death. Citizens are fleeing to the other kingdoms as we speak, and even Daenerys Targaryen has seen the uselessness in conquering King's Landing at this point."

She knows this. She knows this already and she's tired of hearing it. It only ever ends one way.

Baelish reaches for her, grasping her arms and turning her to face him, his gentleness forced and rushed – a falsity. Sansa blinks up at him.

"We have to consolidate power. If we wait too long, this chaos will be of no help to us."

"Then go."

Baelish furrows his brow at her answer, his fingers flexing along her elbows.

She swallows tightly, face a blank visage. "Go to King's Landing then. _Consolidate_." She lifts her chin. "Go."

His throat flexes, poison tongue pressing back behind pursed lips.

"You can't, can you?" she asks, not unkindly. "Because your power lies here. With me. And with the Vale. You can't abandon either of us without giving yourself a disadvantage."

"Sansa." It's almost a warning. As much a warning as Baelish ever gives – all smooth tones and invaded intimacy. His head inclines toward hers.

"Jon won't go South. Not for that." She extracts herself from his hold slowly, gently, without offense.

Baelish smacks his lips, a minute flicker of irritation crossing his eyes, but it's all he will allow her to see of his disturbance. "The King can be persuaded."

"Not in this. The dead occupy him on all sides. He won't play the game."

"Not even for you?"

Sansa doesn't think too long on the way his eyes flick to her lips for a fraction of a second. "You overestimate my influence."

"Oh, I think not," he says lowly, a curl to his lip that reminds her of purple-faced boy-kings and hound-fed bastards.

No, he does not belong here. Not in the white and cold and wind of home. Not here where her mother used to brush her hair and her father used to beg her hand to dance and her brothers played their knightly parts in her tales dutifully. Not here where she had wanted to bury Lady those many years ago.

Wanted, and never could.

Sansa realizes suddenly, that Winterfell is not yet free.

And neither is she.

* * *

In the wake of Cersei's death, the ensuing vacuum of power nearly cripples the kingdoms, with the remainder of the Lannister forces rallying behind a mourning, vengeful Ser Jaime, intent on securing the Reach and the Stormlands. Dorne wastes no time to declare its independence from the Seven Kingdoms entirely, and shortly after the suspicious slaughter of the Freys by unseen Northern hands both the Riverlands and the Vale swear to the North under the threat of a coming dragon queen.

Jon has no time for such politics.

Sansa rails against him openly in the Hall of Lords, demanding his attention to the ensuing fight for the crown, but the dead take precedence in everything he brings to court, and it's not long before ravens are sent to all corners of Westeros begging aid in the coming fight.

Bran watches placidly, neither arguing for or against either of them. Sansa would call him not unlike a piece of furniture if she hadn't better manners, and most days her pleads for his council lands on deaf ears. She ends most gatherings of the lords rife with frustration and nearly frothing at the mouth.

She doesn't need to glance at Baelish to know the look he gives her.

"You think just because Cersei is dead that we are free from the South? That they will not land their hooks into every inch of the North until we are chained to them once more?" Sansa seethes, shutting her door once Jon is through it.

Jon heaves an unsteady breath, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. "That's _not_ what I think, and you know it," he grits out, sending a dark look her way. "Stop twisting my words."

"Then stop ignoring mine."

"I'm not!" He stalks toward her, stops before he can do anything else. His hands itch at his sides. "Sansa, we can't keep this up – this back-and-forth. We can't afford such a divide, not now."

Sansa takes a purposeful breath, hands folding before her. "I'm with you, Jon, I am but – "

"Are you? Sometimes I wonder." He can't help the scoff that leaves him. He stares at her, keeps her gaze a moment longer, and then he's turning to the far window, a hand raking over his face. He's just so tired, suddenly.

Sansa is deadly still. So still he can't even hear the rustle of her skirts on the cold stone at their feet – can't pick up the scrape of air she pulls through anger-fused lungs.

"And how is your show of the dead going with the other kingdoms, hmm?" she bites out.

Jon snaps his head to her, his eyes narrowing so quickly she might have missed it.

Sansa takes a step toward him. "Are they simply _jumping_ to aid us? Are they gathering the entire might of their forces, marching the sum of their armies North, all on your word?" Something sharp glints in her gaze and Jon swallows his reply back instantly. She scoffs, head thrown back. And then her eyes are eerily blue on his – instantly staggering him. "And have I _ever_ demanded evidence? Have I ever once denounced your claims of the rising dead before the lords?"

Jon has no answer. None that would satisfy, at least.

Something in her softens at his silence, another step taken toward him. "I've never asked you to prove anything to me, Jon."

_Jon_, she calls him – always.

(There was never anything to prove between them, after all.)

Jon closes his eyes, takes a long, deep breath, exhales just as evenly. When he opens his eyes, she's still there. Still copper-crowned and winter-poised. Still every inch his sister.

And every inch not.

He thinks maybe it's a sickness – this craving of his.

Jon steps into her, the stiff silence descending upon them like a cloak. He's so close. He's so unbearably close, and even though he has yet to touch her, the heat suffuses him – a stifled winter, a burrowing need.

He can see the way her chest heaves at the sudden proximity.

(She's always been his, even when she won't admit to it.)

Jon thrums a tentative hand along her side, fingers grazing the line of her hip.

Her tongue darts out to wet her lips.

It's a lost cause, he knows. Since the moment she opened her door to him, this was only ever going to end one way.

"I know you're with me," he tells her on an exhale, roiled in heat.

She arches a single, fine brow. "Do you? Sometimes I wonder." She almost smacks her lips with self-satisfaction.

A low snarl eases from his lips, his hand bunching in her dress, dragging her to him. She lets him, hands alighting on his chest. He leans into her, nuzzling his temple to hers, breath ragged already.

She makes it so easy.

He's already panting for her.

(She makes it so hard.)

"Sansa," he groans out, fingers trembling as they reach for her laces.

She takes his face in her hands, pulls him back until his eyes are locked with hers. He doesn't still his unlacing of her. He couldn't even if he tried.

So unbearably close.

(He just needs to touch her.)

"You lose one war, you lose them all," she tells him, arching against him.

She's right, he knows. She's right, and yet –

She comes undone so easily in his hands – they need to stop ending their arguments this way.

Because _this_ – the splendid way she hisses beneath his tongue and the subtle way she arches into his hands and the ragged pant of his name (his _name_) along her bruising lips –is a war they can't afford to lose.

(This is a war they haven't even begun to fight, not truly – not by the light of day.)

"I'm with you," she whispers against his mouth, and he knows.

He knows, he knows, he knows.

And even still –

Some wars aren't about who's right. They're only about who's left.

* * *

Arya returns to Winterfell in the dead of night. Ghost clambers to wakefulness at the foot of Jon's bed, the sharp rap on his door jolting him from sleep.

It's Davos at his door. "In the hall, Your Grace," he says, and nothing more.

Jon rushes from the room, following his Hand and the faint shadows Davos' torch casts along the walls. When he turns the next corridor, he sees Sansa emerging from her own chambers, Brienne at her side. Her sworn shield tugs the fallen slip of Sansa's robe over her lady's bared shoulder at Jon's presence, and the motion does not go unnoticed.

"What is it?" Sansa hisses in the night.

He shakes his head, throat parched.

It happens moments later.

It happens when they breach the shadowed hall. It happens when Arya turns from her appraisal of the room, eyes a slate grey that should be comforting, _familiar_ – but are only haunting. She is perfectly still in the filtering moonlight through the tall windows. She is perfectly winter-poised (an eerie reflection of the sister beside him, and distantly, he wonders if either of them knew they'd ever grow to be thus).

It's a crack, a fissure – a lung-scraping quake that sunders through the silent hall.

Ghost is the first to break the stillness, trotting up to Arya with an ease that staggers Jon's heart in his chest. But Arya smiles – _smiles_ – and it's a faint curl of her lips, before she's bending like reeds in the wind, reaching for the direwolf's great maw and threading her fingers through his thick fur, hands gliding over Ghost's face and ears and neck. Something of sorrow and fondness sweeps over her face then. "Hey, boy. You've been keeping watch for me?"

Jon is breaking toward her then, something splintering inside him he hasn't a name for, and then she's in his arms, and he's lifting her up, up, and _up_, her feet off the ground, her arms around his neck, his broken gasp of her name smothered in her hair, and he's trembling, absolutely _shaking_ against her, absolutely shattered – here, to be _here_ – with his little sister in his arms. He holds her for an immeasurable amount of time, for eons and epochs and yet he'd hold her still, if only he could. It never seems enough.

Jon dips her back to the floor, breathless, glancing back at Sansa, and he stills suddenly at the way she stares at them.

Arya keeps a hand at Jon's elbow, her smile receding. A soft, keen quiet overtakes her. Her eyes shine with tears. "Hello, Sansa."

Sansa takes a step, hand outreaching, and then stops herself. She takes a sudden breath, and Jon is too overcome to think much of it, so he braces a hand at the small of Sansa's back, urging her toward their sister.

He doesn't catch the way Arya's eyes trail the intimate motion of his hand.

"Arya." Sansa's voice catches, and then she's stumbling into her, arms wide, drawing her little sister to her chest.

Arya's eyes shutter closed for a moment, breathing something of relief against Sansa's breast, her hands fisting in her robe at her back, but then she's blinking those grey, haunting eyes open to Jon.

He feels cracked open. Bloody and bare. Jon swallows the trepidation back.

Their sister is returned.

His hand burns beneath the memory of Sansa's heat at his fingertips.

* * *

Arya knows.

She _knows_, Sansa thinks when she catches the derision in her little sister's eyes from across the courtyard. Somehow, she knows.

Sansa steps purposely away from Jon as they walk together below the ramparts.

He furrows his brows at the motion, a hand going to her elbow. "Sansa," he begins.

She huffs her frustration, staying his hand.

He's always been terrible at pretenses.

"Our sister is watching," she mutters beneath her breath pointedly, and she can see the way his spine straightens, the way his shoulders stiffen.

She is Sansa Stark. And he is Jon Snow. And not for the first time has she lamented this – though perhaps not so much as now.

Now when he is close enough to touch and yet the chasm widens ever farther.

This chasm called honor.

(But there is nothing honorable about the ways in which he touches her in the dark of night.)

Jon is silent for long moments, before he comes to an abrupt halt at the edge of the courtyard. Sansa turns to find him staring at his boots, brows furrowed. He heaves a sigh, a calloused hand wiping down his face, and then he's turning swiftly, walking back the way they came. Sansa watches him go, something constricting in her chest not unlike grief. She looks back across the courtyard to see Arya still watching her. Her jaw locks, her barred teeth caught behind perfectly poised lips.

There are some things Arya will never know, she reminds herself.

She will never know the way Jon's eyes grow dark by candlelight, or the way his throat flexes beneath the press of her tongue, or the tremble that racks through him when she slips to her knees at the edge of his bed, bracketed by his thighs.

And perhaps there is something secret and selfish still living in her. Perhaps there is a part of her that revels in the knowledge that while she may not be the favorite sister, she is the _only_ sister who can drag such whines from his throat, who can reduce him to pleading, who can have him panting and desperate as he throws his head back, hand curling in her copper tresses as he pushes her mouth down on his length, hips thrusting shallowing up to meet her.

No, Sansa reminds herself. Arya will never know the dark visage of Jon when the last of his control snaps, when he's pouring filth from his mouth too base even for brothels, when he's rutting into her mouth like something feral, spilling hot and frenzied down her throat as he growls her name through clenched teeth, over and over and over again.

No. Arya will never know the way he looks at her in the aftermath, the way he curls a quaking hand along the curve of her jaw, thumb brushing over her mouth in something perhaps too feverish to be called tender, but just as searing.

She thinks this when she departs from the courtyard.

She thinks this when she feels Arya's gaze following along her back.

She thinks this when she closes the latch behind her to Jon's door that night.

* * *

"You're our brother," Arya says like a demand. "You're _her_ brother." It comes out slightly searing this time.

Jon grips at the mantle over the hearth, his back to her. "I still am."

"How could you be?" Her scoff is lined with something faintly like disgust.

Jon closes his eyes at the sound. He draws a deep breath in, lets it to air.

Arya shifts somewhere behind him. "Robb would never have touched her so."

"Aye, and Robb isn't the brother she begs for at night, is he?" he spits just as harshly, whirling on her. He realizes what he says a moment before he catches the look that passes over her face.

It's not a look she's ever directed at him before.

Jon swallows thickly, the words dying in his throat.

Arya looks away, lips pursed tight. She's so utterly still. This whole while, her entire time at Winterfell, she's been nothing but stillness.

Jon wants to shake her suddenly, just to know she's still there. Just to know he isn't the only one missing what they used to be.

He has to tear his gaze from her – has to focus on the lick of flames in the hearth, the flare of copper too familiar to cool this rancid heat in him. "But I'm not Robb, am I?" he whispers, almost like regret, almost like penitence.

(Almost, but not quite.)

"No," Arya answers, so low he might have imagined it. "No, you're not."

He isn't sure what it is he hears in her voice, and he doesn't have the heart to turn to her then, to see for himself, to know the damning censure of her gaze, even when her voice is indiscernible.

She leaves him then, the heavy door of his solar sliding shut with a nauseating finality.

She doesn't even leave a shadow.

(But he thinks he should have expected this. He thinks he should have expected a lot of things.)

* * *

Jon has known the permanence of betrayal, the way it sinks into your marrow until you are rife with it, until the sharp tang of it has festered long and sour beneath your tongue, until it is behind every look over the shoulder and every false greeting.

Jon sneaks a glance at Sansa beside him, catches the upturn of her chin while she listens to Lord Glover in the Hall of Lords, the resolute crispness of her blue gaze as she sits regally at the head table.

His hand strays to the ends of her furs hanging over the arm rest. He catches the material between his thumb and forefinger, a small comfort. An anchor in the storm.

He glances back out across the hall. All eyes are on Sansa. All but a lone, accusing pair.

Jon catches Arya's glare from across the hall, nearly missing her lithe frame amidst the shrouding shadows of the Stark banners. The flicker of torchlight is not enough to obscure her frown.

His hand slips from the edge of Sansa's furs beneath the table, his throat dry with an apprehension he's never felt before.

They sit staring at each other for long moments – everything and nothing passing between them – the lords airing their complaints and their needs like a fog around him.

"Do you agree, Your Grace?"

Sansa's voice comes to him like a gale.

Jon snaps his gaze to her, blinking rapidly.

He suddenly remembers.

He remembers that Sansa has seen the evidence of betrayal marring his skin. She's seen the gashes along his chest and not withheld her touch. She's smothered his sobs of recollection to her breast when he's recounted the nooses – the way their feet swayed in the wind like a condemnation.

Sansa has never been party to his betrayal.

Sansa will never _be_ his betrayal.

His fingers search for the ends of her furs once more, gripping tightly beneath the cover of the table – no longer an anchor, but the thing that drowns him.

"Aye," he agrees, never needing to know what he agrees to.

Sansa eyes him with something of sharpness.

Jon looks back across the hall. Arya is gone.

He does not relinquish his hold.

* * *

{"Why did you bring her here?"

Bran looks up at Sansa's question. It is a face she used to know once – but not anymore. She holds tight to this image of her brother like sand sifting through her fingers. She wonders if it is not perhaps easier to simply let him fall.

She looks away finally, her hands gripping at her skirts.

The hearth spits another log to cinders before them, and she thinks he means to keep this damn silence always, until, "Because she is needed."}


	2. Don't Look Away

Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Author's Note: Future updates will probably be between one and two weeks, but I just couldn't wait with this one.

Also, keep in mind that this fic is Stark-centric, and the plotlines I'm following won't necessitate the inclusion of certain characters, even ones I love. So don't be surprised if some of your faves don't make an appearance. This ensemble piece can only ensemble so much without losing cohesiveness.

A Violence Done Most Kindly

Chapter Two: Don't Look Away

_"She has had enough of men playing to roles they haven't the right to fill." _\- Jon and Sansa. Stark is a house of many winters.

"My lady, if I may," Baelish calls to her, catching her after a council meeting, halting her in the hall to her chambers.

Sansa stills reluctantly, nodding to Brienne when she eyes the Lord Protector warily.

"Was there something we missed in the meeting, my lord?"

Baelish makes his way up to her, a smile just this side of a grimace gracing his features. "I had hoped to speak with you outside the council meeting."

"We're speaking now," she grants him, and grants nothing else.

Baelish glances to Brienne at her side, eyeing the way she keeps a perpetual hold on the hilt of her sword. Sansa wonders wildly if he remembers that day, so long ago.

_"What if I want you to die, here and now?"_

"Privately, if you please, my lady," he says, head inclined in deference.

Sansa watches him for just a moment, contemplating, and then she's nodding to Brienne, continuing the walk to her chambers where she invites Baelish inside, and Brienne stands guard dutifully by the door, though not without a last lingering look of concern. Sansa offers her a small smile of reassurance before closing the door behind her.

"I do wish to grant you what time you need to reacquaint yourself with your long-lost sister, unrecognizable though she may be," Baelish starts, puffing his chest out with the words as he takes in her solar, "But I do hope you haven't forgotten that there is a conversation to be had between us now, especially so because your brother has gained yet another supporter in your sister." He turns back to her with something like self-satisfaction – keen and impossible to miss.

She begins to remove her gloves. "I have not forgotten."

"Good." A step toward her.

Sansa drops her gloves to the desk beside her. "Nor have I forgotten your warnings."

A gleam lights in his eye, perhaps pride (though it is only a vague measure she can discern), or perhaps simply greed. She is disappointed with herself for not having the skill to distinguish them yet at this point.

"My dear Sansa," he begins, already edging toward her, and it is an endearment that sets her skin to tingling, the base of her spine slipping into a rigidity quite like a familiar armor.

His hands light along her shoulders. She wonders when his attentions and his affectations turned from fatherly to that of a lover. It isn't in the motions themselves, the touches, the caresses. It's in the way he looks at her all the while, the words he spews when he touches her so.

And she has had enough of men playing to roles they haven't the right to fill.

"Did you interpret our last conversation as a warning?" he asks curiously, a false touch of concern lighting his voice.

She knows better than to answer such a question truthfully.

His fingers curl around her arms, drawing her closer to him. "Oh Sansa, you must know I never meant it as such."

"I know very little, Lord Baelish, where it concerns you." She allows herself this small honesty. Truth can sometimes tempt the best of them.

The self-satisfied grin that tugs at his lips makes her quiver, though she tempers the reaction before he can register it. "I've been rather transparent with my desires, Sansa, wouldn't you say?"

She only looks at him, unblinking.

"As transparent as the King, I would wager."

Sansa's eyes narrow instantly, her shoulders stiffening.

Baelish keeps one hand curled tight around her elbow, anchoring her to him, his other lifting to trace her cheek. "You're much too smart to think you can play such a game under my nose without me catching wind of it."

She gulps, lips pursed, offering no rebuke, but no admission either. Her skin feels hot – blistering and not her own. "I'm not playing at anything."

"Yes, perhaps that's the tragedy of it," he muses, a mockingly smooth finger edging the length of her jaw. "Tell me, Sansa, how long did you let your bastard brother beg before you finally spread your legs for him?"  
Sansa jerks back, but he holds her tight, far tighter than he's ever dared to touch her before, and something flashes in his eyes that looks dangerously like possessiveness.

"You will unhand me, Lord Baelish," she grinds out.

He only grips her tighter, bruisingly so, hand clutching at her jaw now, mouth hovering close to hers, a hiss seethed through his teeth. "Or are you the one who does the begging?" he murmurs, eyes fixed to her mouth, brows angled down sharply in an anger she recognizes all too easily.

Joffrey had that kind of anger. Ramsay, too.

_"Not the sort of boy who gives away his toys."_

"I said 'unhand me', sir." It's a command now, a wolfish sort of thing snarled through grit teeth.

"I wonder what it took to hear such begging," he croons at her mouth, dark and promising, ignoring her protest.

"If you want to keep that hand," a voice says smoothly from behind them, jolting them apart, "then you'll remove it from my sister."

Sansa whips her head to the far corner of her room, watching as Arya materializes from the shadows.

Baelish clears his throat, backing from Sansa almost unconsciously, his hands blessedly free of her.

"Arya, what are you doing here?" Sansa hisses at her, breathing heavily, hands curling at her sides until her nails press half-moons into her palms.

Arya swings her steady gaze toward her, cocking a brow. "Minding snakes, it seems."

Sansa bristles at the answer.

Baelish collects himself easily, stepping toward Arya. "My lady, if you would only – "

"I'm not your lady," she answers swiftly, gaze cutting back to his. "And neither is my sister."

He swallows, chin lifting. "This was a _private_ conversation you intruded on, Lady Arya."

"Yes, and all the more shame that it's now made public. But don't let that stop you. Please, do continue." Arya motions toward Sansa with a daring scorn.

Baelish looks between the two. Sansa never takes her eyes off her sister.

"Arya, you need to leave."

Arya glares at her, but then she's looking back at Baelish, taking a step, and then another, making her way smoothly toward him until she's standing just a foot away, head cocking as she looks up at him. "I only ever make threats I intend to follow through," she tells him, dark grey eyes wide and unblinking, harrowing in their intensity.

Baelish stares back at her, riveted. His throat bobs uncertainly.

Sansa sucks a sharp breath through her teeth. "Arya."

And then the younger Stark is offering Baelish a mocking smile, a false comfort beneath her deadly gaze. "My list isn't so long that it can't fit another name,"

Baelish furrows his brows, uncomprehending, but she doesn't wait for a response, stalking away from him to stand beside her sister.

Several moments pass in silence, and then Baelish smooths his hands over his robe, clearing his throat. "Well then," he begins.

"Well then," Arya says almost smugly, hands linked behind her back.

Baelish levels her with a steady stare, before looking up to Sansa. That anger is back, brimming just beneath a still, composed surface. Its sourness is no less visceral, even with her sister at her side, and Sansa thinks this must be how poison works – slow and unseen.

"I bid you good evening, ladies," he says in farewell, before stalking to the door, unlatching it, and slamming it behind him.

Sansa takes a long, solid breath, hands finally uncurling at her sides. She glances down to Arya. Her sister is staring up at her, lip curled, a sneer playing at her features.

"You're being reckless," Sansa throws out on a harsh exhale, shaking with it, and shaking with more.

Arya schools her face back to passiveness, making her way to the door as well. "And you're being stupid." She says it with no remorse, and Sansa didn't think it'd hurt quite so much to hear the familiar words again after so many years.

But Arya leaves without saying more, and Sansa's word of thanks is lodged somewhere between her barren tongue and her clenched teeth, as sour as Baelish's anger had been.

* * *

"Littlefinger will make his move before long. Arya's seen to that," Sansa huffs reluctantly, glancing toward her younger sister as they sit gathered in her solar.

Jon sighs, leaning his elbows over his knees. "We can't afford this – not now."

Arya doesn't look the slightest remorseful. "He threatened Sansa."

Jon straightens at this.

"Arya," Sansa hisses. "That's not what happened."

Arya lifts a brow her way. "That's exactly what happened, even if he didn't say it in so many words."

Jon opens his mouth to press further, but then Arya is scoffing, arms crossing over her chest. Her words still him. "You leave yourself too open to threats, Sansa. Too open… in other ways, as well." Arya slips a look of accusation toward Jon out of the corner of her eye.

The bile is ripe on his tongue – sharp and pungent. Just like the anger.

"Arya, that's enough," he bites out warningly, purposely not looking at Sansa's suddenly wet eyes, her jutting chin, her stiff, yet trembling hands bunched in her lap.

Arya rolls incredulous eyes his way. "You're both fools. You're both foul, _selfish_ fools," she seethes. Her arms tighten over her chest, her jaw locking tight, like collaring a wolf. Like leashing anguish. "And you'll be the end of us."

"_I_ wasn't the one who threatened the Lord Protector of the Vale," Sansa snaps meaningfully.

Arya's face hardens, her throat flexing. "Should I have let you be, then?" Her voice is impossibly soft. "Should I have let him touch you?"

A flare of possession streaks through Jon – white-hot and instant – but it's dampened by the look upon Sansa's face. It's a look he's never seen before, all at once guilty and pleading and proud.

"They're our family," Bran says from his quiet place beside the hearth, nearly forgotten in the sudden vitriol splashed across the room.

Arya spares him a glare as well. "I _know_ that, Bran. And that's what makes it all the worse."

Jon clamps down on the spiteful rush that floods him. She is his sister, after all, and gods, does he miss her. But this is not what he wanted. "Only the pack survives, Arya. We have to – "

"Don't you _dare_ use Father's words after fucking his daughter beneath this very roof," she spits.

The scrape of Sansa's chair is jarringly loud in the sudden quiet, and Jon can do nothing but watch her stalk to the window, his knuckles white wear he grips his knees, his teeth sinking into his tongue as he bites down on his rebuke, the shame tart and instant and utterly unspeakable.

(There can be no rebuke to truth though, he knows this. Even when he wishes he didn't.)

It's the first the nature of their relations have been brought to air – the first that exactly what it is they're doing has been spoken of so clearly And perhaps it isn't the vehemence with which Arya says it that startles him to silence, or the crudeness in how she says it. Perhaps it's just that it was said at all.

The blaring reality of their sin laid out before them, in no uncertain terms.

Arya digs the heel of her palm into her wet eyes, teeth gritting.

Sansa stares stoically out the frost-lined window, taking a single, long breath in, and then exhaling just as slow. Her jaw works beneath the flicker of candlelight.

Jon looks away.

"We'll need Baelish," Bran interrupts the silence

From her position along the window, Sansa's shoulders stiffen, a look of wariness passing over her shoulder when she glances to Bran.

Jon doesn't like the taste that floods his mouth at the sight.

"We'll need his spies," Bran corrects.

Sansa rubs a worrying thumb into her opposite palm. A sigh like he's never heard from her passes through her lips then. She is an altogether different woman suddenly. "Is there a difference?" Her voice hardly wavers.

Bran's eyes shift to Arya. "One face – many faces."

Arya glances up at the words, her ire momentarily forgotten in place of cautious interest.

Something of a smile tugs at Bran's lips, but it's barely-there and fleeting enough to make Jon question its presence entirely. "Perhaps it's not such a difference," their brother muses.

Jon thinks he should feel cold at the glint that passes through Arya's gaze, but he can't summon anything beyond a vague apprehension.

Instead, he looks to Sansa.

She does not look back.

* * *

She leads Baelish to the godswood in the dead of night, and he doesn't see the wolves circling until the mark of his own grave stops him stock still in the clearing.

"Sansa, please," Baelish begs, knees sodden with muddied snow, a gleam of moonlight casting through the weirwood trees to land in slants upon his sweaty, pale face. At his back, Needle stays pressed just between his third and fourth ribs, Arya's wrist poised in shadow, her other arm held at her back, spine straight. She watches Sansa expectantly.

At the gasp of her name from Baelish's lips, Jon takes a purposeful step forward, lip curling, hands fisting at his sides. "Don't you even speak her name," he threatens in a low growl.

Bran's hand at his elbow stays him.

Arya flits slate-grey eyes up at him, narrowing, her lips pursed tightly.

Jon shares a look with her, before he averts his gaze, a heated scoff leaving his lips.

Brienne lights a tentative hand on Sansa's shoulder. "My lady, you do not have to see this."

Through all this, Sansa has stayed resolutely still, a thrum of disquiet washing over her. In her mind's eye, she sees her mother. She sees her father. She sees a brilliant grey banner, direwolves in the wind. She sees a house bloodied by betrayal.

She sees the last song of the mockingbird – words for poison – and she remembers that she has learned the weight of such venom years ago.

"But I do," she answers Brienne, eyes already wet, throat already constricting, even as she nods to Arya.

"Sansa – " Baelish ends her name on a cracked exhale, Needle sliding between his ribs with a quiet slickness.

His mouth is red instantly, lungs flooding with blood.

Sansa starts to shake. She feels Jon's hand at the base of her spine.

"Don't look away," Bran says from his chair beside them –

(Arya is wiping her blade clean before Baelish even hits the snow.)

– "Father will know if you do."

* * *

Arya wears Baelish's skin with an ease that quietly terrifies.

Sansa watches the false-Baelish stride across the hall, calling Lord Royce's name in a voice she still finds sets her skin to tingling.

Sansa stares at the cover that is Littlefinger.

A stranger's eyes stare back, unfamiliar in their familiarity.

She had thought condemnation would look different on a face that wasn't Arya's.

She knows now that she is wrong.

"He's not worth crying over," Jon tells her the next night, when she's busy unlacing his tunic, fingers trembling and frantic. Something of sorrow lines his words.

Sansa stills, looking up at him. "I know."

His hand slips up her jaw, thumb brushing along her cheek so achingly slow that she suddenly feels the wetness along it. "Then why are you?" he asks her, not unkindly. It's a whisper between them, an indiscernible secret let to air.

"I'm not," she bites out.

But oh, she is –

She is, she is, she is –

"Sansa." Something breaks in her with how he says it.

(Or perhaps it was always broken, and she's only just now finding the pieces.)

It's a terrifying tangle of grief and relief that fills her at the image of Baelish's face in the red-filtered moonlight, his pleading mouth forming her name so ardently she wants to strike him for it. "I don't regret it," she admits on an exhale, her fingers slipping from Jon's chest as she stumbles back a step.

He follows her, doesn't let her pull away. He cradles her face in his hands, her tears running freely now.

"I don't regret it," she mumbles, head shaking. "I don't regret it, I _don't_ – I…I don't regret it, I – "

He silences her with a kiss, nothing of kindness to it, nothing of mercy. He doesn't give her mouth the chance to form any more words, least of all those.

She's back to unlacing his tunic, and she isn't crying anymore.

But the tangle has only knotted further.

She doesn't know anymore, what to regret in this life.

Her hand meets his flesh.

(She just doesn't know anymore.)

* * *

Daenerys razes the northern lands of the Crownlands, pushing toward Harrenhal, and what Sansa assumes will be even further toward the Westerlands. She imagines she could take King's Landing if she wanted, but perhaps vengeance urges her west first. A thirst Daenerys must quench before she takes her crown. A kingslayer she must bring to heel before the whole of Westeros. She must recognize by now that King's Landing is not the seat of power it once was, not with more than half the population already fled. If she wants the seven kingdoms to kneel, then she will have to bring the fight to them. Shouting her claim in the middle of an empty throne room will not get her the subservience she craves and sitting the Iron Throne is not so meaningful without witnesses. So she holds her court at Dragonstone, and pushes west.

Jaime Lannister gives up Riverrun to Brynden and Edmure Tully when the dragon queen's forces push too close for comfort. He focuses on The Reach instead, halting their advance towards Casterly Rock. The Lannisters face enemies on all sides from the rest of the Seven Kingdoms, even with having the largest contingent of men.

And yet, it's still surprising when Jaime Lannister is the first to answer one of Jon's many ravens calling for a peace summit.

('_To fight the horde_', Jon had said.

'_To ensure peace amongst the kingdoms_', Sansa had urged him instead, a hand squeezing his wrist, and she watched as the huff of frustration blew from his lips.

Still, he heeded her advice, dipping his quill to the parchment and adopting her calculated words in his missives.)

Jon tosses a scroll to her desk, raking a hand through his curls. "He says he'll come only if he's granted an audience with the Lady of Winterfell," he spits almost mockingly, eyes boring into the parchment as it lays innocently atop her ledgers.

Sansa's brows furrow, fine-boned fingers picking up the scroll to peruse it herself. She licks her lips, looking up at Jon from her seat. "He'll want to know about Cersei."

"You had nothing to do with that."

"Not in his eyes, I imagine."

Jon rests his knuckles along the wood of her desk, leaning over it. "I will kill him before he lays a hand on you."

Sansa takes a deep breath, easing back in her chair. His quiet, violent outburst settles something low in her gut like spitting coals. "And would you have me turn him away over this? When he commands the largest force in Westoros – the kind of numbers we'll need if we want to defeat the dead?"

He doesn't answer her. But he doesn't need to.

Sansa sighs, shaking her head. "We can't win this without allies, you said it yourself."

Jon tears his hands away from the desk, stalking across the length of her solar, staring darkly at the wall, a hand gliding over his mouth. He stalks back along the stones, stopping at her desk again. "I don't like it."

The indignation is easy, ripe in her throat. "It's not your choice."

His eyes flash, his hands curling into fists at his sides. "Aye," he bites out. "It's not."

It doesn't sound like a surrender or an agreement, but Sansa hasn't the patience to argue such a point. "Then the Lady of Winterfell accepts. You can tell him as such when you pen your answer." She links her fingers atop her lap, lips pursed.

Jon clenches his jaw, chest heaving just the once – like trying to rein something in. But then he's nodding his farewell, turning from her, throwing the door to her solar open so harshly that Brienne braces a hand reflexively to Oathkeeper, glancing in on her lady as the King sweeps past.

Sansa scowls at his retreating form, fingers curling into a knot in her lap.

* * *

He thinks maybe the right words will come to him at the tip of a sword. They usually do, and he's never been much good without one. So when he invites Arya to a spar at the far end of the eastern courtyard, well enough out of earshot of any passersby, he doesn't waste time.

"Sansa misses you." He sees the moment the smirk slips from her mouth.

She'd been enjoying the spar, he can tell, and while some part of him aches that he's the one to shatter that moment, to temper that glee, a larger part of him knows how to recognize the temporary and the fleeting at this point.

Arya doesn't blunt her swipes, Needle clacking against Longclaw with a sharp ringing. "I doubt that very much."

Jon steps into the parry, teeth gritting. "I know why you've been distant but – "

"If you know, then it shouldn't be so hard to understand." Her swing lands dangerously close to his cheek.

Jon stumbles back, breath breaking from him with a jolt, a flush of anger heating him. "She's your sister. Shouldn't that be enough?"

Arya straightens, a hand held primly at her back, a single brow arched. "It wasn't enough for you, was it? To have her as a sister?" She doesn't hide the contempt now.

Jon huffs his frustration, swinging low, teeth bared when he meets her blade for blade. "Whatever I've done, whatever I've – " He swallows his words behind a grunt. They meet in a clash, eyes locked. "I won't apologize for what I want. Not even to you."

Arya's eyes wet instantly, even while they harden. She shouts as she shoves him back. "You should have known better! You should have – _she_ should have – " She swings again, too wide, staggering back when he parries her almost effortlessly. "It's like I don't even know you anymore!"

He imagines she hadn't meant for her voice to break on that one, and he understands why she covers it with a snarl, another lunge, but he's finding it harder and harder to brace against her vehemence.

Jon knocks her back, bracing his boots in the dirt to steady himself. His chest heaves, the breaths coming ragged and full. "You've no idea what she's been through."

Arya narrows her eyes at him, twirling Needle into an overhold. "The people talk, Jon. I know what Ramsay – "

"I'm not just talking about what Ramsay did to her!" he bellows, stilling her instantly. His gut churns at the name, even still, even now when he bears the marks of that bastard's ruin on his scarred knuckles, even when he carries him with him beneath his skin (and oh, how he would scar worse if it meant he could mar him again and again and – )

Jon closes his eyes, taking a deep breath as he swallows back the rage.

Because Ramsay was not all of it.

"What do you mean?" Arya is standing eerily still, hair slightly disheveled, gloved hand curling around Needle's hilt.

Jon opens his eyes.

(_Just a stupid, little girl_, Sansa had muttered in a voice so scathing he knew he'd never know the whole of it.

She doesn't like mirrors, he finds. And this, perhaps, makes him saddest of all.)

"I meant down in King's Landing."

Arya doesn't respond, but Needle lowers minutely. Jon takes it as a motion to continue.

Something strikes him then, instant and resounding. "Could you have done it?"

Her brows sharpen down in her confusion. "What?"

Jon licks his lips, continuing. "Could you have held your tongue in the midst of those who killed Father, knowing it would be your head next?"

Arya's chest puffs out, her hiss high and biting. "I would have _died_ to avenge Father."

"And could you have held it knowing that if not, it would be your mother next? Your brother? Your sister?"

Arya stops, throat flexing beneath her tight swallow.

Jon takes a step closer, Longclaw still at the ready. "Could you have taken the beatings, the humiliation, the _constant_ reminder of your helplessness, your uselessness? Could you have listened day after day to the threats on your family? Could you have done _nothing_, because to do more meant worse than death for those you loved?" He's panting by now, quaking in his own skin, desperate, wretched, lungs full with his woe. He can see her trembling from where he stands. Longclaw tips to the ground, forgotten. "Do you know how she cried for you?"

Arya turns her head away, eyes riveted to the stone wall. The tears are more apparent now, though they never fall. Her jaw works beneath her tight words. "I never asked her to."

"Aye," Jon says, nodding, voice cracking. "Sansa did a lot of things for us we never asked her to."

She looks back at him then, her face fierce, a shadow of distress glancing through her eyes, and then gone. She blinks back the wetness. "I don't know what she's been through, no. Not truly. Not entirely." She tilts her chin up, her voice steady. "But neither does she know what I've been through."

And there it is.

The reminder of how he's failed.

Jon crumbles beneath the weight of such guilt, his head lowering, and he digs the knuckles of his free hand into his eye socket, clearing his throat when he looks back at her and his hand comes away salt-tinged. "I know. And I'm _sorry_, Arya, I'm so – " His breath catches, and he has to choke back the break, start again. "I'm sorry I couldn't – "

"I'm not saying it because I blame you." Arya sighs, glancing away to the wall once more. It seems a comfort. "I'm not saying it because I blame her either. It just… it just _is_."

"Would you wish it upon her? What you went through?" He asks it softly, plaintively.

She considers him a moment, eyes a hauntingly familiar grey.

(How like his sister he's always been – and how _not_.)

"No," she finally answers, Needle lowering to her side entirely, the crinkle of her glove resounding in the blaring quiet.

"I think she feels much the same," he offers her, stepping closer, until he is standing right before her, until he can reach a gloved hand up to brush a lone strand of hair behind her ear.

Arya's eyes flutter shut at the motion, leaning into the touch unconsciously. Her lashes glisten with the unshed tears.

Jon's hand retreats, a long-forgotten fondness creeping out between his ribs. He waits until her eyes shift open once more. He waits until she's looking at him, _really_ looking at him. He waits until he knows she's ready to listen.

"Sansa isn't weak," he tells her, voice steady. "She's just strong in ways you've never had to be."

Arya stares up at him, and she is all at once exactly the sister he left, and yet nothing like her at all.

He wants to reach for her once more, but something tells him not to. Something tells him they're not there yet.

Arya flits her gaze to the side, a heavy sigh leaving her. She wipes at her eyes, clearing her throat. She sheaths Needle without further word, stepping back from him. "I'm not okay with what you two are doing," she says finally, voice clear of tears. She looks back up at him and her eyes are dry.

Jon shakes his head. "I'm not asking you to be." It's easy to be unapologetic. It's easy now that he recognizes how little condemnation means to him. Not with this.

Not with _her_.

(He will never be sorry for _that_.)

"But," Arya starts, swallows, starts again. "But I hear you."

Jon stares at her, blinking swiftly.

"I hear you," she says again, and then she's turning and stalking away, their spar forgotten.

He doesn't think they'd have ended in anything but a stalemate anyway, but he hopes.

He hopes.

* * *

{_The hearth spits another log to cinders before them, and she thinks he means to keep this damn silence always, until, "Because she is needed."_

_Sansa nearly scoffs, her throat catching on the noise. She blinks the wetness from her eyes. "We never needed her," she says on a harsh exhale._

_ "We do," Bran counters, no malice in the correction, no reprimand._

_ "We needed _Jon_," she manages through clenched teeth, fingers curling over her armrests like talons. She wants to strike him – her little brother. She wants to claw those desolate white eyes out and find the monster beneath – the monster that did this to them. "We still do," she grinds out. It almost seems a pointless grief now._

_ Bran gives her a long moment of silence, eyes frustratingly vacant. "There can be no Jon without Daenerys."_}


	3. Bone-Deep

Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

A Violence Done Most Kindly

Chapter Three: Bone-Deep

"_She stops, swallowing back the sob, tasting bile at the back of her tongue. She's told this to no one. Not even Jon. It's been her shameful secret, her bloody burden, all these years. It's been her sole, sundering grief."_ \- Jon and Sansa. Stark is a house of many winters.

Jon gets word that Theon Greyjoy has arrived at Winterfell when he's mid-spar in the courtyard.

"The Lady Sansa has escorted him to the godswood, Your Grace," Davos tells him as he's shrugging his jerkin back on over his sweat-soaked tunic, tugging the laces closed over his chest with a vehemence so quiet it rattles beneath his skin

"Your Grace," Davos tries again, softer this time, watching the fury lining his king's face.

"Leave me," Jon growls, already stalking through the grounds toward the godswood.

No one follows him past the gate.

Jon has a memory – a faint recollection thrumming its presence at the base of his skull, itching beneath his flesh.

Theon always knew how to hold his drink, even when Jon couldn't, and it's a bitterly cold, fog-touched morning when they wake somehow in the stables, still mostly drunk off the ale Theon pilfered from Jory Cassel, to the mud-soaked hem of Lady Catelyn's skirts.

Jon remembers looking up into her pinched face, sick at the glower she leveled him with.

"Now, which of you two half-wits are responsible for loosing Lord Stark's horse in the night?" she bites out, nothing but coldness in her voice – winter made flesh.

This was the woman who held him in the midst of fever once. The woman who sang him softly to sleep when the coughs wracked his lungs with a fierceness. The woman who brushed a tender palm to his sweat-lined forehead and stayed the night at his bedside.

The same woman – but that woman has been gone for many years now. And it's only a frost-lined gaze and a perpetual frown that greets him these days.

Jon is sick for an altogether different reason, never mind the ale still roiling in his gut.

"It was me, Lady Stark," Theon admits without hesitance, before Jon can declare his guilt, and he shoots a sharp look Theon's way.

Theon glances back, only just a bit more sober than Jon, and he shakes his head. Just a touch. Just minutely enough for Jon to see, and he swallows back his confession, feeling it light along his throat.

Lady Catelyn shoots a hand out swiftly and drags Theon from the stable by his ear, ignoring his yelp of pain and his drunken stumbles in her wake.

Jon watches from his heap of hay, something brewing in his chest he has never learned the words for.

He catches Theon that night after he's spent the day cleaning the horse's stalls, tired hands rubbing his shoulders with exhaustion.

"Why?" he demands, clean and simple.

Theon looks up at Jon with sleep-ready eyes, slouching back along his chair with aching limbs. "I don't remember my mother."

Jon's jaw clenches, his tongue held between his teeth, so tight it nearly bleeds.

And then Theon's shrugging, head lolling back along his chair as his eyes shift to the ceiling. "But Lady Stark's always been more yours than mine. Figured a bastard could use every bit of help he can get." He hadn't even bothered looking at Jon to watch the jab land, eyes sliding closed in his fatigue.

It isn't until the next day that Theon tells him he took the fall because he'd rather clean stables than take Jory's beating, and now that he knows they swiped his ale, it's _Jon's_ turn to take the fall.

And yet –

_"I don't remember my mother."_ The words linger with him for many years.

Jon had been so _angry_, and so grateful, and so resentful, and so relieved, and he hadn't understood at the time how this one dreadful boy could make him feel all of that at once.

And that's exactly the rub, isn't it? That they were just _boys_, and it shouldn't mean so much, and it _doesn't_ mean so much, and he doesn't know why the memory reaches him now – now when his hand itches for Longclaw on instinct.

Because Robb had been betrayed. Because Bran and Rickon had been forced to flee their home. Because in the end, blood was the final say. And Theon had chosen his.

It was just a horse. Just a stupid, fucking horse.

But sometimes, Jon remembers the flecked grey of its pelt, the hard wood of the open stall door in his hands, the rush of wind in the night when the stallion had broken free.

Sometimes he remembers their drunken laughs on the wind, a cloudless night backdropping their youth.

Sometimes he wonders what they might have been.

But in the end, it's just a horse. It's just a memory. It's just a mistake.

Jon breaks into the godswood to find Sansa sitting atop a snow-strewn log, Theon standing before her. Their conversation halts at the crunch of snow beneath his boots, heralding his approach.

Sansa's face blanks out into a mask, but for a moment, for a split-right-down-the-middle second, Jon swears he sees affection, fondness, a soft sorrow just shy of yearning fleeting across her face. She tucks it back beneath a veneer of calm easily enough.

That sickness is back.

Jon shakes his head, throat tight.

(Just a memory.)

"Jon," Theon says, like a gasp let to air, the name drawing from him on instinct.

Jon's face hardens, his steps surer as they approach.

Theon seems to catch his mistake, head dipping down, hands curling and uncurling at his sides. "Your Grace," he corrects in a voice like winter, like beaten, weathered branches creaking in the wind.

He makes himself small in the face of Jon's wrath, but it does nothing to still him. Nothing at all to pacify the storm in him.

Sansa seems to see it a moment too late. "Jon – " She hasn't the breath to say more, jolting from her seat, hand out-reaching, when Jon rears a fist back and then _swings_, knuckles cracking against Theon's cheek, a sharp whip of adrenaline lancing through him as they both stumble back beneath the force of it.

Theon releases a short grunt of pain, but nothing more, steadying easily. He doesn't even hold a hand to his cheek, doesn't do anything but curve his shoulders even further inward, his gaze on the snow at their feet, his jaw quaking with more than just pain.

Jon heaves a thunderous breath, the fury tight in his bones, the ache – that rending, marrow-deep ache – stilling him before his false brother.

(He doesn't realize until many years down the line that 'false brothers' are all he's ever had, really.)

"Jon," Sansa censures, hands going to his arm.

He ignores her. His eyes are only for Theon. "You fucking dare," he spits. "You fucking dare to show your face here – after what you did?"

"I'm sorry," he mutters readily, too readily for Jon's liking. "I'm sorry, Jon." Like a chant. Like the words have made a home in his mouth, worn their welcome out and bled their presence through to his tongue. There's something wounded in them that Jon cannot place.

Jon sucks a sharp breath between his teeth. His fist bunches in Theon's collar, shaking him.

"Jon, stop!" Sansa's tugging now, fingers curling along the leather of his jerkin, arms feeble in their effort.

"You're _sorry_?" Jon repeats on a scathing exhale, shaking him again, fist at his throat, snarl punctuating the air between them. "Is that what you tell yourself when you remember how they took Robb's head? Is that what you tell yourself when you look at my crippled brother?" His voice pitches high, a tremble to it he cannot rein in.

"Jon," Sansa pleads, tugging at him.

Theon keeps his head hung low, but even from here, Jon can see the wetness dotting his eyes. He shakes him harder, practically quaking with the rage. "Is that what you tell yourself when you see the blood of my family _on your hands_?" he bellows.

"Stop it!" Sansa yells, pushing furiously at him now, wedging herself adamantly between them.

Theon glances up at the break in her voice, mouth parted as though to speak but only a faint choke escapes him, eyes fixed on Sansa.

It makes the anger flare brighter in Jon's chest – white-hot and gripping.

"Stop it!" she yells again, hands pushing at his chest, forcing her way between them, shoving him off them.

Jon unfurls his fist from Theon's collar, stumbling back from the force of Sansa's vehemence. He shifts narrowed eyes to her. "Sansa, if it weren't for him, maybe Robb would still be alive. Maybe _Rickon_ would still be alive. Maybe – "

"Maybe I would be dead," she answers him evenly.

Jon blinks at her. So does Theon.

They stand there, breathing quietly in the falling snow.

"I wouldn't have made it without him," she says softly, lip quivering. "I wouldn't have made it to _you_."

Jon's face falls, silence harrowing through the godswood.

Sansa curls a tentative hand into Theon's sleeve.

Jon eyes the motion with something of contempt, but he doesn't deny her, doesn't move to extract her from him. And maybe this is the fall Theon meant. Maybe this is the only way he knows how to pay his debts.

(It's just a stupid, fucking horse.

Except, it was never about the horse.)

Jon levels his ragged breaths, eyes shifting to Theon with a dark, warning sheen. "Why are you here?"

He doesn't like how Theon's first instinct is to glance to Sansa.

She does not unfurl her fist from the Greyjoy's sleeve.

Shifting his gaze back to Jon, Theon lifts his chin just slightly, if only to keep their gazes level. That something wounded is all about him now – like a shroud, a constant shadow.

This is not the Theon Greyjoy he left as a boy.

But in the end, it's just a memory, and Jon has had enough of those.

"Would you believe me if I said I came for her?" Theon motions to Sansa with a tip of his head.

Sansa lets out a small sound of surprise, leaning into him, her knuckles white from where she holds his sleeve. "Theon," she starts, and doesn't seem to know how to finish.

"I would have died to get you there," he mutters to her, face a ruin, and something flickers along her features in recognition, soft and slow. "I meant it."

Sansa wraps her arms around Theon then, holding him tight to her breast, nuzzling into his neck. His hands hover unsurely in the air, and then they're settling at her back, the perfect level of propriety in his embrace, even when Jon can see the way he leashes his own needful comfort.

"I know," Sansa whispers to him, cheek to his, and Jon feels suddenly intrusive at the tender, intimate scene.

Sansa has not shared all that she endured under Ramsay's hold, and she likely never will. This he can live with. This he can learn to let go, even when the rage claws at him without warning sometimes, even when he looks at the scarred skin of his knuckles and _aches_.

But this is more than Ramsay. This is more than Sansa. It starts with Ser Rodrick's unjustly severed head and then doesn't stop. Not with Bran and Rickon's expulsion from Winterfell. Not with the innocent boys Theon burned in their stead. Not with any of the betrayals he's gifted their family.

It starts and never stops, and this is something Jon knows intimately.

Jon waits until they untangle. He waits until Theon's looking him in the eye when he tells him, "Bran is here."

He wonders if perhaps he shouldn't revel in the dread that glances over Theon's face at the mention. He wonders if maybe this spite is beneath him. He wonders if he's lesser for enjoying it.

He wonders a lot of things, none of which he gets any answers for.

Because in the end, this too, is just a memory.

* * *

Sansa is there when Theon emerges from the room with Bran. He's drawn and quiet and near trembling when he closes the door to Bran's solar behind him. She will never know what words passed between them, and Theon shakes his head at her minutely when she makes her way to him, mouth parted, questions lingering at her lips. She stops just before him, mouth closing abruptly.

She will give him this silence, if he needs it.

What forgiveness or punishment he seeks from Bran is his own business. What guilt he cradles so attentively is his own. It is not her place to intrude, though she only wants to help him bear it. She only wants to carry the weight with him.

It clings to them still, this shadow of the past – like a hand at their throats, a harsh whisper at their ears. Some wounds linger.

Sansa knows this intimately, just as Theon does. And so she will keep this silence for him.

Because redemption is not a shared weight, and her shoulders are only so wide.

Because he does not ask more of her than her hand at his arm to guide him through the halls.

Because she refuses to be a lingering wound for him.

They formally receive Theon in the Hall of Lords, with Jon at the center of the head table, Sansa at his side, and Bran at his other. Just behind Bran, Arya stands half-bathed in shadow, hands held at her back. The stance is no less imposing, even in its nonchalance, and Theon flicks his gaze uneasily from hers to face the King in the North fully.

"You said you came for Lady Sansa," Jon says tightly, back a rigid line. "Explain."

Theon flicks hesitant eyes toward Sansa, just for a moment, but a moment is enough. The rush of recollection is cold and vibrant – his trembling hand in hers, fingers worn and half-dead, a long, far drop into the snow off the walls, the biting freeze of the river through her soiled dress.

Sansa sits straighter, her face softening. She offers Theon an encouraging smile, and it seems to be all he needs, nodding imperceptibly before glancing back to Jon.

"I'm here to extend House Greyjoy's wish for an alliance."

Silence pervades the hall. Jon's scoff breaks the quiet like shattered stone. Theon bristles at the sound and Sansa stiffens in her seat.

"If you'll recall, the last time you suggested an alliance to the King in the North, it didn't end so well for him," Jon snarls, hands gripping at his armrests.

Theon dips his head in quiet acknowledgement.

Jon sneers at him. "I have no assurances of you or your family's loyalty."

Theon snaps his head up. "Yara is not like our father. She's a good queen."

"Perhaps your love for family blinds you."

"Can you say any different?"

Jon glares at him, mouth thinning into a tight line.

Theon gulps back his trepidation, hands unnervingly flexing at his sides. He licks his lips, ignores the murmurs starting up around the hall with their audience. "I want to protect my family as much as I want to protect yours, as much as I…" He stops, the words floundering on his tongue. He glances back to Sansa, just for a moment. "I owe House Stark more than I will ever be able to repay. I don't… I don't pretend otherwise. But there's a war coming, if what you say is true, Your Grace, and I don't believe you're the kind of king to turn away an ally – even a Greyjoy – when your own people are at stake. At least, I _can't_ believe that. I can't, and I won't – or else we're already lost."

Sansa can see the way Jon's jaw works beneath his frustration. Her fingers flex over her armrests, the unease tugging at her chest.

"What do you ask of us in this alliance?" Bran's question broaches the quiet.

Theon looks at him steadily, seeming to weigh the words on his tongue before he lets them to air. "Our uncle, Euron Greyjoy, has sworn to the dragon queen in return for her support in taking Yara's rightful place."

Sansa flicks her gaze to Arya briefly, remembering such news when her sister had revealed what she'd learned from Baelish's spies. Arya glances to her as well, a cautious look shared between the two, before they're both returning their attention fully to Theon. He lifts his chin, eyes blinking swiftly. It's a motion of discomfort that Sansa has grown to recognize in him.

"All we ask is that the North supports Yara's claim and the Iron Islands' independence, just as it has the Vale and the Riverlands."

"The Vale and the Riverlands have both offered aid for the war," Jon explains, a deep frown marring his features. "What can the Iron Islands offer?"

"The proof you need to win over the other kingdoms," Theon says firmly, a steady confidence taking hold.

Voices break out in the hall and Sansa lifts a hand in a motion of silence instantly, the lords quieting uneasily. Jon leans forward in his chair, eyes narrowed at Theon. "What did you say?" he demands.

Theon takes a deep, sundering breath. "Yara sailed north about a moon ago, as far north as the ice would permit. Said she'd drag the dead back with her bare hands if that's what it took to get this summit of yours going, if that's what it took to solidify this alliance."

Jon releases a short, stunted laugh, wiping his hand down his mouth as he leans back in his chair.

Beside him, Sansa furrows her brows in concern, a sharp breath drawn from between her lips. "She's mad."

Theon smiles in a way Sansa' never seen before, and she wonders wildly if this is what a brother's love is supposed to look like.

"That she is," Theon agrees beneath a smothered chuckle, shaking his head. "But she keeps her word better than anyone I've ever known." He grows somber then, quiet and still. "I figure Starks of all people can appreciate that."

It's not said in insult, she knows this, and Jon must as well, because when she glances at him beside her he isn't glaring at Theon like he had been only moments ago. He's simply staring at him, lips pursed, reply caught at the edge of his tongue. It's such a perfect picture of hesitation that she has to stop herself from reaching for his hand in some measure of assurance. Instead, she clears her throat. "Your Grace," she starts, if only to get his attention.

Jon turns to her instantly, brows raised. There's a question on his face, but it's a question she cannot read, let alone answer.

And so she only shares what she knows, what she can vouch for _without_ question. "I trust Theon."

Jon's brows angle sharply down in a measure of disapproval, and a huff passes his lips that should anger her, but somehow only makes her want to laugh.

"Olenna Tyrell has turned her armies North," Arya says softly behind them, and Jon inclines his head at her voice. "I imagine we'll be receiving her answer to your request for a summit any day now. I suggest we have something to show for it when they arrive."

Jon nods silently, considering, but then he's flicking that heated glare back toward Theon, a tightness to his still form that Sansa wishes she knew how to ease. "And if your sister fails?"

Theon glances to Bran, mouth opening, and then closing. He takes a steadying breath, voice even when he finally finds the words. "Then House Greyjoy pledges to the North regardless." He looks back to Jon, eyes unblinking. "We will meet the dead with you, one way or another."

Sansa's breath shudders from her, quiet and disused. But Jon catches the sound, turning to her in the ensuing uproar around the hall. She looks at him without words, mouth parting in futility. There is nothing she can say, she finds, to beg his trust in this. Nothing she can say to endear him to Theon in any way that doesn't also betray that which she promised herself never to share.

Because to share her past with Ramsay is to keep him alive.

Because yes, some wounds linger – closed and scarred as they are.

Because she will not reduce herself to an identity defined by the survival of abuse.

"I trust Theon." It is all she offers – all that matters, she finds.

And it is all that's needed, in the end.

Jon heaves a long-labored sigh, wiping a hand down his face. A familiar weariness sets into his frame, and she knows his answer well before he voices it.

_"I trust Theon"_, she had said.

_"_Trust_ me"_, she had meant.

Yes, she supposes she's always known his answer.

* * *

Arya enters her solar with a purposeful gait, closing the door behind her slowly.

Sansa glances up at her, eyes narrowing; her sister does not seek her out. She is their brothers' sister. She is not hers – not like she should be.

(Not like she wishes her to be.)

Arya looks around her chambers for a moment, eyes alighting on the sparseness of it, the utter lack of sentimental objects.

"Was there something you needed?" Sansa asks finally, a hand smoothing over the ledger spread out over her desk. She leans back expectantly.

Arya stands at the edge of her desk, hands held behind her back in a mirror image of Sansa's own familiar posture. But Arya's eyes are sure. They are Stark grey and unclouded. "You stayed – in King's Landing, after father's murder."

Sansa notes the use of the term 'murder' rather than 'execution' and eases somewhat under her sister's stare. The distinction is enough to make her forget whether Arya is speaking in questions or facts. She clears her throat, nods her assent. "I did."

Arya watches her a moment, head tilting in a familiar thoughtfulness that is so strikingly nostalgic, Sansa feels the air tighten in her lungs.

"You let them beat you, humiliate you, cage you like a culled wolf." There is no accusation to the words, but Sansa feels it all the same.

The anger flares bright and hot in her chest. Her hands spread slowly over the desk, jaw locking. "You would rather I have fought? You would rather I have given them more opportunity to hurt Robb and Mother? Or you?" Sansa scoffs. "And gods only knew where you were when I was left to Cersei's bitterness, to Joffrey's violent whims." Her eyes harden, something steeling up her spine. Winter takes root in her bones so easily these days. "Did you know they made me take it down from the pike? Father's _head_? With my own hands, my own – " She stops, swallowing back the sob, tasting bile at the back of her tongue. She's told this to no one. Not even Jon. It's been her shameful secret, her bloody burden, all these years. It's been her sole, sundering grief.

Arya draws in a long, slow breath, shoulders stretching back, arms never unlinking from behind her. If she looks hard enough, Sansa will see the sheen of wetness over her eyes, the quiver in her jaw, the tremble of her lips even as they dip into a harsh frown.

She's gone too far, she thinks. It isn't Arya's fault. No more than it is hers. Seven hells, but they were just _children_. And even still…

Even still, the resentment lingers. The lonesome wolf in her bares its teeth to the sister that left too soon.

(She doesn't know how to admit to having _needed_ her.)

"Would you have had me fought?" she asks again, this time seethed through bared teeth – this time with the tender weight of regret.

Arya considers her a moment, blinking the wetness from her eyes as though it had never been. Her hands slip from behind her, hanging limply at her sides. Her eyes drift to the desk, unable to meet Sansa's. "If you had fought, you'd be dead."

It's not a new truth. Sansa's thought it herself but –

"And I'm glad you're not dead," Arya finishes softly, eyes still fixed to the desk.

Sansa stills. Her chest aches. It aches and aches and –

She blinks back the sudden tears.

Arya looks up then, eyes hardened once more. Her back straightens, and then she's heading to the door, having said her piece.

Sansa stands so swiftly her chair topples back along the stone floor, clattering sharply in the drawn quiet.

Arya halts with her hand on the door, a look over her shoulder that Sansa will not be able to name for many years to come. "Cersei bled out slow," she tells her evenly. "She bled out alone."

Sansa stands watching her, breathing heavily, worn and spent and desolate. Realization blooms beneath her skin like a bruise.

Arya opens the door. "I wanted you to know that," she tells her. She looks back just the once, and then she's gone.

The door closes before Sansa's whispered 'thank you' can even broach the air, and then she's sinking to the floor, hands fumbling for purchase along the stone, the whisper of her wool skirts a fluttering thing in the quiet of her solar. Her hands curl against the floor until her nails catch along the stone like a wolf's bite, blood at her fingertips. Sansa takes a long, slow breath – lets it to air. She breathes, and breathes, and chokes on it. A single, bone-rattling wail rakes through her lungs, reverberating off the stone walls.

She stays there long into the night, long past the time it takes to recognize the first dregs of freedom, the first glance of light.

She stays there until it is no longer Cersei's golden visage seared into the backs of her eyelids but _Arya's_.

Her sister.

She has never been a lonesome wolf, she finds – she just took a little longer getting back to the pack.

The North remembers, and so do sisters.

(She knows now how to admit to needing her.)

* * *

Jon announces a summit at Riverrun.

Olenna Tyrell has formally answered his request for her presence during the peace talks after the Lannister forces showed their intention to attend when they withdrew from the Reach. The disjointed lords of the Stormlands follow suit quickly. Lord Royce ensures Robin Arryn's attendance and hope for a continued alliance, and Edmure Tully accepts Jon's proposal for the peace talks at Riverrun, granted, of course, that a large enough garrison of Northern forces ensures their protection at such volatile talks, as such an alliance would demand. Jon agrees readily. There is still no word from Dorne.

And then a scroll bearing the wax seal of a three-headed dragon makes its way to Winterfell's rookery.

Jon smooths over the edges of the scroll, recounting its contents to his siblings as they sit in Bran's solar. It's marked with Tyrion Lannister's signature, his own calculating yet verbose speech marking the message as self-penned, rather than any true response from the dragon queen. Jon tosses the unfurled scroll atop Bran's desk with an air of frustration. "She wants Jaime Lannister, _specifically_, to bend the knee, but her demands extend to all the kingdoms."

"I imagine it took some plaintive urging on Tyrion's part not to demand Ser Jaime's _head_," Sansa answers, a purse to her lips that signals a serious contemplation.

He wonders if he should be wary of the look.

"According to Baelish's people, Daenerys isn't altogether happy with her advisors," Arya interjects, arms folded over her chest. "She wants to rain fire and blood across the Lannister armies. Over the Reach and the Vale and the _North_, as well. It'll be a short and bloody war if she does."

Bran nods, eyes alighting on Jon. "She'll pursue peace first, so long as it's in her interest. She recognizes that she cannot secure the people's love if she's only seen as a brutal conqueror."

"And if we choose not to kneel?" Sansa asks, less a question and more a statement.

"Daenerys Targaryen will not permit Northern independence." Bran's voice isn't even apathetic at this point. It's simply _there_. Like the snow settling on the windowsill, or the hiss of a crumbling log in the hearth, or the flex of Sansa's fingers atop her lap, stiff and poised.

Arya tilts her chin, the rest of her eerily still, one leg crossed evenly over the other.

It's Sansa that speaks. "Northern independence needs no _permittance_," she seethes out, face a winter visage.

"She thinks otherwise."

"She thinks wrongly," Arya says, voice low and immovable.

Jon glances to her, and then back to Sansa, brows furrowing at the way they each stare unabashedly at Bran, fierce in their refusal. He wipes a hand down his mouth, sighing into his palm. "She'll want an audience."

"She will," Bran agrees.

A steady, thoughtful silence.

Sansa shifts in her seat. "We have more urgent concerns. The dead are – "

"There are no concerns more urgent," Bran interrupts, and Jon is so taken by the firmness of his voice that he hasn't the mind to consider the terror of such a notion.

Because surely the dead would take precedence. Surely the dead were the worst of it.

Bran's eyes slide evenly to Jon's, a quiet confirmation.

Jon's lips part, the breath stealing from him.

"She imagines herself a savior," Bran offers, something flickering in his gaze that Jon is too wary to call ridicule. "Use that."

He can only nod.

They begin the march south the next day, and it isn't until Jon and Sansa and Arya-wearing-Baelish step foot through Riverrun's gates, with Bran lingering behind in Winterfell, that Jon realizes it wasn't disdain coloring his brother's eyes.

It was apathy.

And he doesn't rightly know which is worse at this point.

* * *

"Hey there, sweetwater," he says to her.

Sansa blinks up at the Blackfish, watching the way his face softens at her, the way his eyes wet, the way his throat flexes beneath his words. On either side of them, the riverbanks are lush and verdant – a winter-less shore. There is nothing dead here, not yet.

_"'Sweetwater'_, _he always called me – my uncle. _Your _uncle_."

Her mother's words are instant and warm at her ear.

She offers a perfect curtsy, not trusting her voice.

Brynden Tully swallows his smile behind a trembling lip. "Her little lady, I see. Her Sansa."

Sansa lifts her gaze to his, something lodging in her chest she thought long lost.

They stand staring at each other for long moments, and then the Blackfish takes her hand. She watches her small, fine-boned fingers being swallowed up by his own scar-riddled palms. But it calms her in a way she thought she'd never feel again – not since her father's head had rolled down the steps at the Sept of Baelor.

"I'm not Catelyn," she finds herself saying, even as her voice cracks. She keeps herself from trembling, eyes fixed to where their hands are joined.

Brynden chuckles, releasing her hand. He stands taller, hands adjusting his belt. He heaves a sigh and it seems all at once regretful and longing. "No, I imagine not."

She flits her gaze up to his, jaw tight.

(She wants to fling herself around him and she doesn't know why. She wants to hold him to her and know the warmth of the river, the freshwater tide, the lull of currents.

She wants to remember what it is to be held.)

Brynden reaches a daring hand out to stroke her cheek. "It's lovely to meet you, niece." And then his hand retracts, his posture straightening just a moment before he dips into a reserved bow, hand held at his chest. "My lady."

(She wants to hold him, she finds.)

There are no rivers like this in the North, and oh, how she misses her mother.

"Please," she urges, hands ushering him up.

He chuckles at her earnestness, rising at her insistence, and Sansa finds that memory is still a bone-deep thing.

"As you wish, sweetwater," he says.

She smiles.

And when Brynden Tully offers himself as a sworn shield to Sansa that very night – that first evening she sits at the table of her mother's childhood home – she finds that yes, memory has always been a bone-deep thing.

As deep as rivers.

* * *

{_"There can be no Jon without Daenerys."_

_Sansa narrows startled eyes at him, a crisp blue beneath the salt-sheen. "What?"_

_ Bran heaves a sigh – something of tedium to the sound – like he's trying to explain something to a child._

_ Sansa bristles at the thought._

_ "There is an old sort of magic to sacrifice. A _strong_ magic."_

_ "Is that your excuse?" she spits, the anger white-hot and searing at her lips, sudden and vitriolic like she's never felt before, not even for Ramsay. "Is that your excuse for killing him?"_

_ She likes to think it's remorse that has him turning his head, but the reality is closer to indifference when he answers her, "Yes."_}


	4. Nooses

Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Author's Note: I just want to put it out there, that I have NOT warned against Major Character Death. Just saying. And I ain't saying more.

Also, this one is a bit Sansa heavy but I couldn't help it. I think you'll see why.

A Violence Done Most Kindly

Chapter Four: Nooses

"_Sansa has learned to read faces like Arya has learned the wearing of them_._"_ \- Jon and Sansa. Stark is a house of many winters.

Sometimes he sees the nooses swaying in the wind. There are always bodies at the ends of them, but they are not always discernible. They swing like dark, hooded shadows, catching flecks of snow so soft even _that_ seems a betrayal in the midst of such brutality, such ardent death.

Jon takes a long, slow breath, easing it out through unsteady lungs. His hands spread over the balcony edge before him, looking out across the Riverlands, the long train of lords and their bannermen arriving from throughout the seven kingdoms for the summit – like a flood of ants.

Beside him, Davos stands watching pensively.

Jon remembers the smell of shit when those traitors died. That much he recalls. The rope had snapped taut and their voices had choked out and their bodies had jerked their final release, an end without glory, without even the dignity of a clean corpse to burn. Their filth had stained the wooden planks beneath their swinging feet for moons after.

_"Now I rest"_, Thorne had said. Jon wants to scoff at the words. Men like them never rest but for the grave, and even that could not hold him.

(He wants to die, he wants to live – sometimes the difference is hard to discern.)

An anger suffuses him – sharp and ripe and fervent. A familiar anger.

Olly had looked upon him with hatred, even in the end, even with a rope at his throat. And maybe the man Jon used to be would have staggered beneath such a stare, would have grieved this loss. But Jon is not the man he used to be, and he startles at the realization that neither does he _want_ to be that man again.

_"You'll be fighting their battles forever."_

Jon swallows tightly, eyes still over the plains.

Jon knows who his people are, and he will not forget again. Alliser Thorne had that much right, at least. You choose your enemy, and you stick with it, no matter the squalls. You do not let the others into your home. You do not lead them to your hearth. You do not look outside.

Fighting for others has only ever gotten him killed.

So now, he will fight for _his_.

Yes, Olly had looked upon him with hatred in the end. And Jon had welcomed it. He made sure, after cutting the rope himself, to turn and watch them struggle their last, watch them twitch out the final dregs of their pathetic, traitorous lives.

Because it wasn't hatred on Olly's face anymore. It was a pungent, grotesque fear. A terror so engulfing his blue-tinted skin burgeoned with it, his bulging eyes swam with it.

And it was _right_.

"Do you ever wonder how things might have happened if I took up Stannis' offer?"

Jon's question is unexpected in the silence, and Davos snaps his gaze to his king, a furrow lining his brow. "Your Grace?"

Jon sighs, gloved fingers curling over the cold rail. "If I'd accepted the Stark name he promised to grant me?"

A long silence blankets the space between them, and Jon sees the nooses swinging once more. Shadows on the wind.

Davos clears his throat. "Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but I don't think you take very well to things 'granted' to you."

Jon answers with a single raised brow, a glance out of the corner of his eye.

Davos leans his weight to one leg, chest puffing out slightly. "I only mean that you… you've rather a talent for 'taking', Your Grace."

The anger alighting Jon's tongue diffuses into a mild tartness, his throat flexing beneath his thick swallow.

Davos inclines his head toward Jon, hands held at his back. "I don't think you'd ever be happy with a name you hadn't taken for yourself," he explains, a faint smirk lighting his features. "Your Grace," he tacks on at the end – almost purposely.

Jon had taken his justice when he let those bastards swing. He'd taken his home when he shattered Ramsay's jaw beneath his fists. He'd taken his throne when the lords hailed him a hero. He'd taken his sister when he wanted her.

Perhaps there was wildling in him yet.

Jon offers a barely-there smirk to his Hand before he's turning swiftly back toward the hall behind him, his cloak billowing in his wake.

The North is his. Sansa is his. And those are the only battles he wants to fight anymore.

He knows who his enemies are. He knows where the nooses lay –

And Jon is not done taking.

He stalks from the balcony, lips pressed into a thin, hard line.

Perhaps he never came back wrong. Perhaps what was wrong was a world that demanded he come back _right_.

Given the chance, he'd swing the sword again – he'd let hang those bastards every time.

He'd take what was his.

(The nooses never stop swinging.)

* * *

When Tyrion Lannister exits the carriage in the middle of Riverrun's main courtyard, Sansa is all of thirteen years old again. She's floundering, alone in the enemy's den, her innocence like crushed dragonfly wings dragging at the ends of her skirts through deadened grass. She is a girl again.

And not in the way women sometimes _wish_ to be girls again.

Arya steps up beside her suddenly, but she is wearing Baelish's face, and what should be comfort at her sister's quiet presence instead hammers at her heart like slow-brimming terror. It shudders beneath her skin like memory.

"Lady Sansa," Tyrion greets, something of fondness lining his voice, and Sansa feels sick suddenly. He looks at her kindly, as he always has, and perhaps that's where things begin to splinter.

The most favorable of her husbands, to be sure, but on his chest rests the pin that announces him as Hand of the Queen, a conqueror intent on chaining the North as fervently as Cersei once had, as all the Southron kings and queens once had. This is not a former husband she greets. This is an adversary – wearing their shared past like false comfort.

"My lord," she answers with an inclination of her head, a practiced smile at her lips.

"Please, Sansa," he urges. "I believe I asked you to call me Tyrion the last time you addressed me so."

"And I believe the last time I addressed you so, you were still my husband," she points out with a raised brow.

Tyrion clears his throat, nodding as though to himself, and then offering a perfunctory greeting to the false Baelish, a strained smile at his lips. His eyes take in the courtyard around them.

"I apologize for my brother's absence," Sansa says, grabbing his attention once more. "His Grace is in talks with my uncle, the Lord Edmure, and Lord Robin Arryn of the Vale. He extends his welcome, however, as well as his thanks for you and your queen's attendance at our peace summit."

"Yes, well, peace sounds absolutely refreshing at this point, my lady. There's been enough death these last few years."

"Speaking of which," Sansa begins, "where is your queen?"

Tyrion's lip quirks slightly at the unvoiced insult, taking note of Baelish's own amused smile following the words. "Daenerys will be here shortly."

"Arriving on dragon-back, I take it. A good show of power."

"You'll forgive her dramatics when you see what kind of queen she is, I'm sure. She'll do much good for Westoros."

Sansa can only offer an acknowledging hum, her own thoughts on the matter kept tight behind pursed lips.

Tyrion's face shifts then, brows furrowed, a keen unrest overtaking him, and Sansa imagines he's thinking of the last queen Westoros had known.

She shrugs her furs closer around her shoulders, licking her lips. "I can't say I'm sorry for your loss, my lord, if I'm being honest" she says as quietly and kindly as possible.

He shakes his head, face pinching tight. "Cersei was….she was…" Words fail him suddenly, and Sansa thinks it's the first time she's ever witnessed such a thing. He swallows whatever he had failed to say, offering a tight smile instead, pulled at the edges like a fish gutted on the hook. He simply nods.

Sansa's eyes flutter to the floor, a grim remembrance shadowing her thoughts.

Sisters can be terrible, wonderous things, after all.

Sansa clears her throat, eyes glancing back up. "Lord Baelish, I believe that is Lord Varys I see emerging from the last carriage."

"I do believe you're right, my lady."

"I'm sure he'd like a visit from an old friend. I'll escort Lord Tyrion to his chambers myself. You may leave me."

Arya nods in Baelish's skin, offering a farewell before leaving the two.

Tyrion watches her go with a wary look. "I had heard he was working for the Starks now."

"An exaggeration, my lord. Petyr Baelish works for no one but himself. You and I both know that."

Tyrion looks back at her with an appraising look. "And yet he seems to have your confidence."

"He has his uses." She lets a secret smirk cross her lips and does not bother to check it when Tyrion catches sight of it. Truth can sometimes tempt the best of them, she reminds herself. "Please, my lord, if you'll follow me." She directs him through an archway at the end of the courtyard and then they're making their way through the halls of her mother's childhood home. It does not escape her that Riverrun will soon be housing both Lannister men her mother had once held prisoner. Sansa squares her shoulders, stalking through the corridors just a touch more forcefully.

War makes strange bedfellows, in the end. And she – _they_ – cannot afford grudges of the past bleeding into the present.

Her mother would forgive her, she knows. Because her mother would have also honored guest right if it meant protection for the North, protection for _her_ North.

The pack survives, after all.

"Your brother and his forces are to arrive any day now," she tells him, breaking the quiet that's overtaken them since they left the courtyard.

Tyrion releases a short, almost anguished chuckle. "So many happy reunions. I daresay I should have brought more wine."

"You may yet need it."

"You know, I don't recall you being quite this sardonic when we were married, my lady."

"You hardly knew me when we were married."

Tyrion is silent at her back for many long moments, and then, "I would have liked to, if you'd let me."

Sansa stops, turning to him stiffly. He almost stumbles into her, hands curling and uncurling nervously at his sides when he looks up to her.

She keeps her gaze cool, her tone civil. "You would do well not to mistake a child's regard for romantic attachment, my lord. I am not the girl you once thought to save."

Tyrion swallows thickly, hands held up as though in surrender, head shaking. "I meant no offense, my lady. I only meant it in true friendship, please."

Sansa considers him for a moment, silent and pensive, and then she's turning back without a word. He follows instantly. They make it all the way to his temporary chambers before either of them speaks again.

It's Sansa this time, motioning to the door with a graceful hand. "Your chambers, my lord."

He nods, stepping toward it, hand on the knob, and then he stops, takes a deep breath, turns back to her.

She watches him expectantly.

"I worried for you, Sansa, when you'd disappeared after Joffrey's wedding. Truly, I had."

"I believe that," she says honestly.

His hand slips from the door handle as he turns fully to her. "I would have protected you, if you'd stayed." There's something fervent in his voice then, almost angry if she looks too closely at it.

She wonders if she will ever escape the anger of entitled men, or if perhaps that has always been the end of any lady.

"You could hardly protect yourself." She tries for indulgent, but it comes out more like disdain.

Tyrion's jaw works beneath his words. "And yet here I am."

Sansa pulls a steadying breath through her lungs, her fingers itching for the hook and pin chain anchored around her throat. "Yes, I suppose murder has its merits," she says calmly, almost admirably, if it weren't for the twitch of her lip signaling her scorn.

Tyrion's eyes widen, and he takes a step closer. "What did you say?"

It comes to her like a gentle hand brushing the hair from her neck, a tug at the laces binding her dress, a tender admonishment when she takes one too many lemon cakes. "We all do what we must to survive," she says lowly, a streak of accusation lining the declaration.

Taking a deep breath, Tyrion tries for words. "Sansa, what I've done – "

"I wasn't talking about you."

Tyrion blinks at her, brows furrowed.

(It comes to her with dark hair and dark eyes and dark humor. It comes to her like the ache of scars.)

"I was talking about Shae." She steadies the quake in her voice, chin lifting. "I couldn't care less for your despot of a father, but Shae was good to me. Shae was kind. Shae deserved better than what you gave her."

Tyrion blanches at the words, eyes widening. "How do you – "

"Bran knows what you did. He tried to tell it to me. I told him I didn't want to know – not entirely."

Tyrion just stares at her, hardly breathing, his jaw clenching beneath his brewing words.

As a girl, she hadn't understood their relationship. As a woman, she still doesn't. And perhaps that is the point.

Tyrion wipes a hand down his face, drawing a ragged breath through his lungs. "Why?"

He doesn't have to specify further. She understands all the same.

Sansa looks off to the far wall, hands gripping themselves tightly before her. She will not shake. She _does not_ shake. "I don't want to know the details. I think I might lose all civility toward you, otherwise, and I can't afford that just now. I just… I can't. Jon needs peace. And I need – " She stops, breath catching, hands flexing in their hold. "I need peace, as well."

Tyrion closes his eyes, face pained, hands bunched into fists at his side. "Forgive me, my lady, but I – "

"I don't," she interrupts curtly, the words already lighting her tongue before she even realizes she's given them air. "I don't forgive you, my lord, not for her. In fact, I don't know how you forgive yourself most days."

His eyes snap open to hers, a heated breath flaring his nostrils. "You said your brother… 'knows'. What do you mean?"

There's a bit of the man she knew in him still, she finds.

"In time, my lord," she says. "Should your queen agree to accompany us back to Winterfell, perhaps you can ask him yourself."

She does not wait for his response. She does not entertain the conversation further. She simply turns from him, stalking back along the hall, low heels clacking in the silence. She simply leaves him.

(It comes to her like a lonely remorse – like the missing of someone you can never get back.)

She cannot ask Bran further – she _cannot_.

_"We all do what we must to survive."_

It's the hardest lesson Shae ever taught her.

* * *

"Did you kill Cersei?"

Sansa's eyes narrow at the question.

Jaime is haggard. A remnant of a man. His once brilliant blonde hair is dusted with grey and unattractively coarse, the lines on his face telling of years not worth recollection. There's a stiltedness to his stance, a ring of practiced disinterest to his words that betrays his hollowing grief.

But Sansa has learned to read faces like Arya has learned the wearing of them.

The words draw from her lips before she can collar them. "No, I did not."

Jaime clenches his jaw, his one good hand settled along the sword at his waist – a sword that draws her attention like a gale across still plains.

_Widow's Wail_.

Sansa frowns. Such a foul name. It has no place in the North – in her father's court. Not even when it hails from Ice.

(Such a sword would never stand across from Ned Stark's daughter, or the North knows no justice.)

Jaime nods – slowly, patronizingly, lips smacking with something of disdain. "My sister always warned me not to treat with wolves."

"Yes, well, your sister's dead now, isn't she? So it matters little, I suppose." Sansa offers him little more than a blue-frost gaze, hands held at her back, head tilted slightly as she gauges the Kingslayer.

Jaime's mouth dips into a harsh frown and he takes a step toward her.

Brienne pulls Oathkeeper half out its sheath in a motion of warning, an urge of temperance at her lady's side.

Jaime flicks unsteady eyes at Brienne, and Sansa does not need to look back at her sworn shield to know the hurt that pulls at her features. There is another conversation happening in this room – one she may never be privy to.

There is another war being fought.

Sansa closes her eyes, breathing deep.

She hasn't the heart for this. She hasn't the heart for any of this.

"I didn't kill your sister, but I would have," she says on a voice far steadier than she expects, eyes flickering open to catch his.

Jaime glances to her with furrowed brows, all tense muscles and hardened angles. All sharp grief. He simply looks at her. She almost looks away.

(Almost, but not quite.)

"Given the chance, I would have," she tells him, more sure this time, voice hardly trembling, hands hardly curling and uncurling at her back, chest hardly heaving.

Something startlingly like a chuckle issues from his lips, and then he's wiping his good hand over his mouth, shaking his head, and he looks like he's about to cry, or break something – break her, maybe.

Brienne keeps Oathkeeper hovering half-unsheathed in the air.

And then his chuckle catches in his throat, a sharp bark of laughter bubbling up, and he's turning round, taking in the hall, slowly circling back toward Sansa, his laughter spent and hollow and tear-laced now. Jaime sniffs, brushing a hand under his nose. When he looks back up at Sansa, there's nothing of fury in his face. "No, you wouldn't have," he tells her surely.

Sansa's mouth parts, her denial ready and scathing on her tongue.

Did he know what Cersei had done to her? Did he know how she kept all she held precious at a knife's edge? Did he know how small and lonesome and _wrong_ she had made her feel? Did he know how she imagined winding her own bare hands around her golden neck and wringing her breathless?

Did he _know_?

Did he know how she had ruined her?

(How she had made her?)

Sansa stares at Jaime, spine tingling, nails digging half-moons into her bundled palms at her back. She doesn't trust her voice just yet.

Jaime nods, seemingly to himself, eyes drifting to the floor between them in the sparse room. "No, you wouldn't have, little dove." There is no doubt in his voice.

Sansa recoils at the moniker, her voice lodged in her throat. She stumbles back a step, finding Brienne's sure hand at her back, staying her.

She wants to spit at his feet. Wants to kick his teeth in. Wants to grab him by the collar and shake him and shake him and _shake him_ until he could see.

Until he could _see_.

She would have killed her. She would have.

Sansa feels the tears rising without her bidding.

She would have, she tells herself.

She _would have_.

Her hands itch for his throat, for his face, for his eyes.

(She only needs him to see.)

Because she would have – she would have – she would have –

(She wouldn't have.)

* * *

Sansa requests an audience with Olenna Tyrell the moment her forces arrive in Riverrun, and the two find themselves in Brynden's solar that very evening, with the setting sun casting orange slants of light through the open windows beside them.

Sansa folds her hands demurely before her, offering a soft smile in greeting. Behind her on one side is the Blackfish, her sworn shield and Tully ally. On the other side is Baelish, or at least, the face of him. Olenna grants the false Baelish a single, appraising glance, but it isn't enough to garner mention. Instead, she offers her greetings, settling into the chair opposite Sansa with two Tyrell guards at her back. Sansa barely notes their presence.

"I had feared the worst for you when I heard of your marriage to the Bolton bastard. I'm glad to see he's gotten his due." Olenna fixes her skirts around her, leaning back with a comfort that irks Sansa, though she finds it difficult to place why.

"Are you?" she asks, a single brow raised.

"Of course, my dear girl."

"I am not your 'dear girl'," she answers back, face blank. "I am a lady of my house and you will address me as such, _my lady_."

Olenna thrums her fingers along her armrest, an interested smirk playing at her lips. "Very well, my lady. Let us not dither about then, hmm? Why have you summoned me thus?"

"I have not 'summoned' – "

"For one who demands transparency, you're awfully keen to deflect it, Lady Sansa."

Sansa purses her lips. She likes Olenna Tyrell, she finds. She always has, if she thinks too long about it. But liking her has done nothing for her. 'Liking her' has not changed the fact that she indirectly shouldered Sansa with the blame of Joffrey's death, pinning her with Cersei's ire, as though she hadn't enough torment from that woman.

No, this could not stand. But Sansa is not foolish enough to throw away a card worth playing simply because of honor.

She's seen what that does to those she holds dear.

"I've called you here to negotiate your allegiance," she says at length.

Olenna rests her elbows along her armrests, folding her hands before her in a casual, disinterested manner Sansa has never been able to master. She cocks her head with that familiar, nonchalant smirk. "My allegiance, hmm?"

Sansa nods.

"And where do you propose it should be?"

"With the North."

Olenna fairly nearly snorts, if a snort could sound lady-like. "It is a fool's errand, this war of yours. Old tales of even older threats. Dust on the wind. A falsity."  
"Then why are you even here?"

Olenna considers her a moment, a wrinkled finger drawn over her lips in contemplation. "Our people are tired of war." She is suddenly older and frailer than Sansa remembers, an intangible exhaustion writ across her face.

Something softens in Sansa. A memory, maybe. A fondness and recollection so far gone she'd thought it lost. The taste of lemon cakes. Olenna's weathered hand in hers when she tugged her toward the garden – _speak freely, child_ – and the tender caress she gave her cheek at Joffrey's wedding.

The caress that stole the vial of poison from her necklace – the ruse in her touch.

Sansa's face hardens at the remembrance. Wolves aren't the only ones who protect their own. This she knows. And she loved Margaery, more than she will ever be able to say aloud (because such affections outside of family have never ended well), and some part of her – the part that had watched her father's head tumble down into the mud, and the part that had borne bruises like penance for a brother who never came, and the part that remembers Baelish's kiss like a wounded animal remembers the lance – that part of her will always hold tight to her heart the memory of Joffrey choking on his own terror, face purple, eyes bulging, mouth gaping like a slaughtered boar.

And even still –

She had run into the hands of yet another terror. Another manipulator. Cersei, at least, had the decency not to hide her intentions.

No, Sansa reminds herself. Olenna had done her no favors.

"The people are tired, and so am I," Olenna sighs.

Sansa watches her, mouth pursed tight.

Olenna huffs, straightening in her seat. "I've lost my granddaughter. My son and my grandson. House Tyrell ends with me. But the Reach shall not – if I have anything to say about it. And I have _much_ to say, as you well know."

Sansa can't help the slight smile that pulls at her lips, the chuckle that begs her tongue for release. She shifts in her seat, hands unfolding to grasp at her armrests. "I hoped as much."

A raised brow is her only response.

Sansa cocks her head. "If you truly desire peace for your kingdom, then your best interest rests in backing the North."

Olenna offers a rueful laugh. "I fail to see why."

"You killed Joffrey."

A silence pervades the room. But it lasts only a moment. Olenna smooths over her skirts, deliberately not looking at Baelish (but Sansa doesn't need such a cue, not when he already spilled his secrets like the blood he left on the snow floor of the godswood). "History," she states, calm and unmovable. "I don't see how that – "

"I'm sure Jaime and Tyrion Lannister would love to know the truth of his death."

Olenna only stares at her, bemused smirk securely planted across her face, eyes unblinking.

Sansa takes a deep breath, releases it just as slowly. "Jaime Lannister may not be the man he was, perhaps not even the man he pretends to be, but he is surely a Lannister, and Lannisters always pay their debts, didn't you know, Lady Olenna?"

At her silence, Sansa continues. "And Tyrion. I'm sure he'd like to know who's at fault for his trial, for the crime that nearly took his head and then took everything else from him."

"You think I care what those dolts think of me?"

"No," Sansa says, "But Tyrion is Hand of the Targaryen queen now, and even if she didn't care about her Hand's grievances, she surely couldn't be seen denying him retribution when the truth comes out. And the Lannisters are practically at your door, I hear. I highly doubt Jaime would call off his men at such news."

Olenna leans back in her seat, appraising Sansa with a quiet, tense deliberation. Her arms move back to the armrests of her chair, insultingly plush beneath her tapping nails. And then she huffs a laugh, short and deliberate. "I fashioned you a bird, Lady Sansa, a little caged bird," she laughs, biting it off with a resigned sigh. "But you were a wolf all along."

"You had to have known I wouldn't let such trespass lie."

Olenna shrugs as though it's another conversation over lemon cakes and cheese, as though King's Landing's gardens are once again at their backs, as though Margaery is lingering just at her peripheral, popping a bite of sweet into her mouth with a look of mischief.

Sansa's chest aches suddenly, and oh, how she misses Margaery. How she always will.

"Truthfully, I hadn't expected you to live long enough for this conversation," Olenna throws out casually.

Brynden doesn't disguise his grunt of disapproval at her back, but Sansa looks at him with a glance of forbearance, her hand raised in a motion of calm.

Olenna smiles at the display despite herself. "You've found yourself quite the circle of swords." She glances to Baelish, a steely glint to her eye now. "Some more sharp than others." There's something accusatory in her glare with the words, but Arya does not betray anything, keeping the perpetual smugness to Baelish's face, hands held securely behind her. "Be careful they do not find your back a more tempting target," Olenna warns.

Sansa doesn't let the smile linger long. "I shall keep that in mind, my lady. And you?"

Olenna offers her a dull gaze. "And me?" she prompts.

"Your allegiance – "

"Yes, yes, Highgarden shall fight with the North," she waves away, already impatient to end the conversation.

Lemon cakes and warm afternoons and a frail touch to her wrist.

Sansa swallows tightly. "I'm sorry," she says, before thinking better of it – not even knowing what it is she's sorry for. Perhaps everything. Perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps for thinking that 'sorry' could ever be enough.

Olenna eyes her quietly, shifting in her seat. She shakes her head, hands drawing back together. "You aren't."

Sansa almost refutes it, mouth open, but no words come.

"And you shouldn't be," the other woman finishes, head cocked in something Sansa might have called fondness if she had known her better. Olenna flexes her fingers, mouth curving into a smile she hasn't used in many years. "Were you my granddaughter, I'd have been proud of you."

Something swells in Sansa – unnamable and out of grasp. Margaery always had kind eyes, even when they were narrowed in calculation, even when they were fixed to the crown, even when they shed no tears.

She was always kind to _her_.

It's the sort of kindness Sansa has always made excuses for – the sort of kindness that never looked for its own gain.

Because what could the Rose of Highgarden have ever gained from a winter thorn?

"Cersei is dead." It's the only comfort Sansa can offer now, scant as it is. Her mouth goes dry with the words.

Olenna nods, looking out the window at their side, the faint lip of the sun barely discernable over the river's gleaming horizon. "And so is Margaery. So are the rest of House Tyrell. You can keep your paltry consolation, Lady Sansa, I'm much too old to care for it now."

They share a hard silence. Nothing moves. Nothing sounds.

Sansa thinks she knows the weight of such grief. She sees it in the direwolves she stitches along her handkerchiefs, and the dutiful, singularly focused way Arya sharpens Needle, and the dust-lined, unopened threshold of Robb's rooms.

Olenna blinks back at Sansa, a heavy breath pulled through her lungs, and her hand raises slightly, before lowering back to her armrest, as though she intended to pat Sansa's hand, as though she meant some meager comfort in the midst of all this ugliness.

Sansa watches the motion with steel-cut eyes, never betraying her sorrow. "Let them rest," Sansa whispers in what she hopes sounds like solace, soft and genuine.

Olenna tilts her head, lips pinched tight. A look of pitying disdain crosses her features. "Can you, my lady?"

"I must," she answers almost instantly, and she doesn't think she's ever said something so true, so needful.

Nodding silently, Olenna grips her hands before her, looking back out the window, watching the dying glint of sunlight cast its shadow across the still rivers.

The sun sets completely before either of them finds the will to part.

* * *

Daenerys Targaryen is the last to arrive at Riverrun, her army of Unsullied shadowing the plains like a plague, her dragon's beating wings blacking out the sun that crests the hills when she lands. Dawn has never seemed so dark before.

She's beautiful, Jon discovers. As beautiful as the rumors say, or maybe even more so. But it's the sort of beauty that feels vaguely untouchable – like the high branches of an old oak, the leaves glinting light off the winter sun in an iridescence that momentarily blinds. And there's a mournfulness to such unreachable beauty – for leaves come untethered from their branches all the same, after all, and winter will see them snow-laden and trodden beneath boots soon enough. There is nothing enviable about beauty when it's the lonely, distant sort.

"May I present Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen," Tyrion begins with a respectful gesture to the dragon queen now before them.

Another woman at Daenerys' side opens her mouth, as though to introduce her further, no doubt with the many titles Jon has grown weary of reading in their shared missives, but Euron Greyjoy interrupts her then, striding forward with a smug look and a hand hefting his belt up higher. "Your _queen_," he says with dramatic admonishment, before turning to Daenerys beside him with an exaggerated look of awe. "As she is mine."

Daenerys suffers him a tolerant smile and a quick nod, before her attention returns to Jon. "You must be Jon Snow." Her voice is clipped, her smile stiff.

"You've been misinformed, Your Grace," Sansa says beside him, before he can voice his own response.

Jon shoots a glance at her, his brows furrowing.

"This is King Jon of House Stark," she corrects, her eyes shifting to Euron for only the briefest of moments, a glance so cursory it could hardly be called acknowledgement. "As he always will be."

Tyrion gives Sansa a desperate look that she dutifully ignores. Behind her, Brynden muffles his chuckle with a forced cough, a fist shadowing his smirk. Daenerys flashes violet eyes at her, her smile so rigid, Jon wonders at how her face doesn't crack beneath the force of it.

"Lady Sansa, I presume," she says, ignoring the correction of her address. "I've heard much." She glances to her Hand, and Tyrion clears his throat in response.

"Yes, well – " he begins, before being cut off.

"To the best of my knowledge, the Riverlands do not answer to any king," Daenerys says, eyes flicking back toward Jon. "Unless I've been misinformed of that as well," she adds dryly, a challenge in her tone.

Jon sighs, jaw working. "No, they do not."

She lifts a single brow, lips drawn in a self-assured smile.

Something tugs at the space between his ribs – coarse and impertinent. "The North believes in independent autonomy. We recognize our allies as fellow sovereigns, not subjects."

Daenerys offers him a calculative gaze. "Yes, I suppose you would." She purses her lips in thought.

Stepping from behind her, a war-worn man inexplicably reminiscent of the North moves forward. "Khaleesi," he says, voice warm in its urging, "We've traveled far. You should rest before the summit." He glances up to lock gazes with Jon. "I'm sure our hosts are eager to have us settled. We all need clear minds to garner peace."

Daenerys inclines her head to her advisor, the harshness bleeding from her features, a flicker of quiet acquiescence passing through her eyes. "Of course, Ser Jorah. That is why we're here, after all."

A silence suffused with apprehension blankets the courtyard, until Daenerys plasters another stiff smile upon her regal face, hands coming to wind together before her expectantly.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jon can see the way Brynden nudges Edmure with an impatient elbow. Edmure steps haltingly forward, hands held stiffly at the edges of his jerkin, as though he doesn't know where to place them. "Your Grace," he greets, clearing his throat. He stills momentarily when her violet gaze shifts toward his. He licks his lips, standing straighter when he tells her, "Riverrun is the ancestral home of the Tullys, and as their ruling lord, I humbly offer you a welcomed stay. Your chambers have already been prepared."

"How gracious of you," Daenerys answers with perfect poise, an inclination of her head just low enough to be proper but never low enough to be servile. Her eyes flicker briefly to the Starks once more, before she follows Edmure Tully into the main hall off the courtyard, disappearing into shadow.

Jon looks to Sansa beside him. She looks resolutely back at him.

She is the beauty of roots, he realizes. And he knows now how to recognize the fleeting and the lasting.

(Winter never takes the roots.)

Come the next morning, the summit has officially commenced. By the time introductions are made and seats are taken and all of Westeros' lordships and sovereigns are gathered in the great hall, the sun is high in the sky and Jon's patience has waned into a taut edginess. He takes a long, slow look about the hall. It is a room full of enemies. It is a room full of allies.

Daenerys sits regally, glaring across the room at Jaime Lannister, who flicks imaginary lint from his tunic in his best show of nonchalance. Lady Olenna scrutinizes the dragon queen behind a veil of disinterest. Euron eyes the hall predatorily, fingers thrumming along his armrest when he catches sight of Theon at Sansa's side, a knowing smirk lining the edges of his cruel mouth. The Blackfish muffles his rumble of displeasure at the leer the Greyjoy sends his niece and Edmure Tully tugs on the ends of his jerkin, adjusting the fit as he straightens in his seat. Robin Arryn looks positively bored next to a stout and attentive Lord Royce, with False-Baelish filling the seat between him and Sansa, and the lesser lords of the Stormlands and the other kingdoms, as well as his own Northern bannermen, Mormont and Glover included, pepper the remaining seats about the hall.

Tyrion clears his throat beside his queen, and it begins.

'A room full of enemies' seems the more apt choice, Jon finds. He sighs, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose.

_"You'll be fighting their battles forever."_

Amidst the rising voices and the flaring tempers and the perfectly veiled threats, Jon begins to understand something he hadn't before.

He glances to the dragon queen – all fire-lit ire and impossible demands and a curl to her lip like tempered madness – the beauty of impermanence marring her features.

(He sees the bodies swaying in the wind, the dark crimson of his blood still caked beneath his betrayers' fingernails.)

Jon understands now that some nooses will always be self-made.

* * *

{_She likes to think it's remorse that has him turning his head, but the reality is closer to indifference when he answers her, "Yes_

_Sansa stands swiftly, hands wringing together (if only not to wring _him_), her breath coming in short, shallow draws. "This isn't – Bran, you can't…you can't _do_ this – you can't just –"_

_ "It's already done, sister."_

_ She stops then, something aching in her at the endearment. But it's not enough. It's not enough to beg her forgiveness. Her vision nearly goes white with the rage. "I should have stopped this."_

_ "There was never any stopping it."_

_ Her mouth parts, her feet taking a step toward him without her knowledge. "Bran – " She will never admit to begging, nor to the violent current thrumming through her palms, itching for his pale throat._

"_Fire sows no seeds," he tells her.}_


End file.
